Word: ghosting
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...Harper Pitt (Patrick Wilson and Mary-Louise Parker), a closeted gay Mormon lawyer and his disturbed, pill-popping wife. Around them orbit historical and mythological figures: Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the diabolical former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy who is gay, closeted and stricken with AIDS; the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), whom Cohn, by pulling strings, got executed for treason; and an angel (Emma Thompson)--the spiritual avatar of America. When she smashes through the ceiling of Prior's apartment to draft him as an unwilling prophet, all hell breaks loose--or, really, terrifyingly, all heaven does...
...rerun in one-hour episodes and in one six-hour shebang), but its high-literary and low--pop culture sensibility--it references Hegel and The Wizard of Oz--best recall Dennis Potter's British mini-series. (The Singing Detective's Michael Gambon even shows up as, of course, a ghost.) And it ranks in TV history with Potter's masterworks. The key to Angels is that it is realistic and fantastic at once--a miraculous event in mundane circumstances, like a biblical visitation--and Nichols' movie-series is appropriately epic and gritty. He can as capably bathe a scene...
...regeneration a possibility for Willie? Sure. This is a Christmas movie. But it's also a Terry Zwigoff film, and the auteur of such dark delights as Crumb and Ghost World is not about to abandon his obsession with dysfunction among the lower socioeconomic classes. He holds back Willie's reformation until the last possible moment...
...unraveling them. The Opposite of Fate is an attempt to pull at some of the loose ends, with added ruminations on the quirks of celebrity authorship, recollections of rocking-and-rolling with Stephen King and an inevitable (and forgettable) commencement address. But Tan's best essays are essentially ghost stories that cut through the knotted past to recover a measure of understanding...
...most problematic thing in my mind stems from the associations of watching an SUV zip down a California highway as seen from a helicopter. While anchors and talking heads prayerfully whispered the word “Bronco” as if it might, repeated sufficiently often, summon the ghost of O.J. to inspire Michael to make a break for it, we saw the final nail driven into the coffin of a treasured 21st century orthodoxy: the belief that somehow, after Sept. 11, our media culture had fundamentally changed...