Word: fatales
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...these filmmakers are bumping into one another at the crossroads of Independence Highway and Career Boulevard. At this intersection there are many collisions, some artistically fatal. Directors can take the small-and-noble path, which may consign them to the fringe approval of the critics. Or they can take go Hollywood. There they may find readier financing for their off-center dreams; but they may also be on the fast track to hackdom, scrounging for films chosen by studio bosses. They pay your money and they take your choice--your independence...
Under the bold, sensitive direction of Jonathan Demme, Winfrey's Sethe is a creature as stern as she is strong--as much oak as flesh and blood. She moves with the heaviness of someone dragging large and fatal memories behind her like a full steamer trunk. She is, as the book puts it, "iron-eyed"; her gaze is an Old Testament judgment, her love a demon that can crush those it enfolds. The actress and the character share intelligence and passion, but in many particulars Sethe is the anti-Oprah. If Sethe were a talk-show host, she would stare...
...children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation from which she had escaped. In the novel, Sethe is pursued by the spirit of the one child, Beloved, who died at her hand. But the film is really about the things we do for love, about the fatal consequences of moral strength, about the need to hold on to what we've given up for lost or dead...
...trouble learning his part as a bereft father. He doesn't know which to give the upper hand to--sadness or anger--and whether it's more manly to suffer in silence, drink in hand, or rage out loud, with his finger on a trigger. "This was the fatal habit of Polonius: to stand in the shadows, listening, peering at life with half an eye, letting others take the risk of living and despising them...
Life offers such a grim plenitude of fatal accidents, of deaths visited on the undeserving without discernible pattern or purpose, that serious fiction, as opposed to mysteries and thrillers, tends to shun or downplay such events. Writers and readers alike expect stories to make sense, after all, and random tragedies simply don't. So author William Trevor takes something of a risk when he opens his latest novel, Death in Summer (Viking; 214 pages; $23.95), with a woman riding a bicycle along an English country lane being hit and killed...