Word: edens
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...ENGLISH PATIENT For so many European wanderlusters who found an Eden in the Sahara, the desert was a woman--dazzling, enveloping, with a vastness that held all their dreams. In such a place, just before World War II, the Hungarian aristocrat Count Laszlo de Almasy finds his ideal desert woman and follows her to hell. He then lives, just barely, to tell the tale to a ministering angel (Juliette Binoche) who can give him what he needs: not absolution but understanding. The lovers are Ralph Fiennes--all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur--and Kristin Scott Thomas...
Which brings us back to Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall...
...moral progress breaks through. People like Jesus and Buddha come along and say radical things that somehow stick in the world's consciousness. And the most animal of institutions--such as slavery--do seem slowly to die out. Who knows where this could lead? Personally, I'd rather see Eden on the horizon--however dimly and elusively--than in the rearview mirror...
...fighting off his militant, singing infestation. Then the country-folk-meets-city-folk story quickly gets on an even simpler track when Joe sees his dream girl, Lily (Megan Ward). Golden-haired and slo-mo, she tends a garden niche and hopes to convert a local lot into Eden before her senator father (Robert Vaughn) makes it a prison Hell...
They make a swank couple with Old Hollywood reverbs: Grace Kelly dating James Dean. Pitt has updated Dean's outsider hero from East of Eden in the unhappy-family saga Legends of the Fall and played Anne Rice's Louis as a vampire without a cause. He's good at it, but in Hollywood there are a million broody hunks; Pitt has the primacy but not the patent. Paltrow could be something different, maybe unique. She could bring elegance, lightness of touch, pedigree--what used to be called class--back to American movie acting. She has shown glimpses...