Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...line, with occasional exceptions. Lawyer Jake, despite death threats or a torched house, persists in defending, against all logic, and McConaughey's boyish good looks and exquisite hair carry him through admirably. Yet it is often more compelling to watch Kiefer Sutherland, a brother of a slain redneck, encountering evil greater than himself during his Klan warm-up meeting, or Chris Cooper (again as a sheriff, markedly different from his "Lone Star" role) grimacing his way through shock and pain...
Disaster sends us looking for the devil. As the aftermath of Flight 800 showed, it is a terrible anxiety, a kind of low-grade moral infection, not to know exactly what evil you're up against...
...mine forever I was learning fast that victims are pursued by many kinds of ambulance chasers, and they don't all have law degrees. Put the media too on the list of those who would denigrate tragedy by treating it as a curable disease. Good coming out of evil is always a popular angle on a story. If nothing else, victims can always be ennobled by tragedy, finding a new meaning in life, growing and changing for the better. Cheer up, America! No matter how horrible things seem, the future is always bright and tragedies are mere glitches...
...Melville did not mean the heavens. He was inclined to look for an evil principle at work in the heart of things: at sea, the white whale, Moby Dick, would serve the purpose. Around his home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Melville had to strain himself to turn a locomotive into a dark metaphysic: "Hark! here comes that old dragon again--that gigantic gad-fly of a Moloch--snort! puff! scream!" "Great improvements of the age!" he wrote contemptuously. "Who wants to travel so fast? My grandfather did not, and he was no fool." Earlier in the 19th century, there...
...University of California, Santa Barbara, Gwyneth rushed into film work. In the 1991 Shout, she escorted John Travolta through his fallow period, and she played Peter Pan's young Wendy in the hollow that was Hook. She got a break at 19 when she was cast as the evil Ginnie (she steals jewelry from corpses) in Steve Kloves' Flesh and Bone. Wearing Lolita sunglasses and a play-dumb smile, she displayed slow sass and a wicked intelligence. "She was sunshine and light when she walked into the room," says Kloves of Paltrow's audition, "but as soon as she read...