Word: fleshed
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Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically plot props and . . . please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely yarn -- the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt -- then let it unravel at the denouement...
Because it doesn't -- because the violin maker chooses wood over flesh -- Un Coeur en Hiver seems to take place inside Stephane; it is a story of a woman's passion, told with a man's disconcerting reticence. In an overheated Hollywood summer, this movie is a sorbet that goes straight to the heart. And once there, it has a chilling effect. It says that genteel talk can be the most hurtful obscenity...
Since Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. in 1924, Hollywood has often toyed with the looking-glass motif, though never on Hero's mammoth scale, where so many cars crash that the audience becomes rubberneckers. Schwarzenegger, a live- action cartoon in the flesh, and McTiernan, who made the brains explode on time in Die Hard, might seem just the team to send up the dizzy conventions of the action genre. At first they do so, smartly. A wounded cop mutters, "Two days to retirement," and promptly dies. And Arnold's version of Hamlet is even funnier than Mel Gibson...
...European rackets are burgeoning, trafficking incidents are also cropping up in the U.S. In Houston, Korean-controlled nude-modeling studios have been supplied by flesh traders who bribe American soldiers based in South Korea. The G.I.s are typically paid up to $5,000 to marry Koreans and bring them back to Fort Hood, Texas, where they divorce them for an equal sum. The women, who speak no English, are then forced into brothels in Houston, Detroit and other cities. Compelled to repay the marriage fees and plane fares, and threatened with violence, "these women live in fear," says Harris County...
Public concern over the flesh trade is rising. Last year Pope John Paul II expressed "horror over the degrading practice of sex tourism." In 1990 he had warned that "men, women and children must not be used as objects at the expense of their inalienable dignity." And a backlash against the sex trade is taking form in several countries where it has long been entrenched. In Manila the new mayor, Alfredo Lim, vows "to eradicate prostitution," and has padlocked 300 bars. Under a new law, pimps and clients will face prison and deportation. In Karachi human-rights lawyers are mobilizing...