Word: escapist
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This year's games, in bucolic Lillehammer, in serene Norway, promised to be more than usually escapist. The ideological bombast between East and West has vanished without even the vestige of the old order that marked the Albertville competition in 1992 -- the "Unified Team" of swiftly separating nations that were united only in rejecting their common heritage. This year's tiny host nation, a folksy land of reindeer and trolls, has welcomed the world with no harsher intention than occasionally overcharging for a beer...
...17th. Disney's Beauty and the Beast will transpose to the stage the hit songs and scenic devices of the 1991 animated film, itself based on a venerable fairy tale. If art is supposed to be relevant, Broadway is missing the message. And if art is an escapist time machine, Broadway's has one setting -- backward...
...quaint foreign folk. Authors tend to subscribe to the crude narrative conventions of culture clash and nation of contrasts, where faraway lands seduce the reader with their irrational, undeveloped, unhurried, unchanging, quintessentially un-Western ways. And readers, doubtless locked in urban sprawl and economic recession, have lapped up such escapist literature with alacrity...
Doerr juxtaposes these escapist psychologies with the brute materialism of Bud Loomis, the developer of the community. He jumps America to avoid a hearty dose of tax arrears and irate IRS officials. Before you can say, "Guillermo es tu tio," he has married a peasant girl and started breeding bulls...
...narrative defects of Oscar Hammerstein II's book are too glaring for Prince's razzmatazz to overcome. At best the script is a faint and fractured ghost of Edna Ferber's overstuffed novel. At worst it is a herky-jerky alternation of melodramatic vignettes yanked out of context and escapist bursts of clowning and dance...