Word: girls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exposure and the culture of propriety go far beyond sex and sartorial choices. One of my first journalistic assignments came from an American women's magazine. In September 1994, when Cairo was hosting a U.N. population conference, CNN aired footage of the backstreet genital mutilation of a young Egyptian girl. Egypt's conservatives claimed that CNN and the girl's family had shamed Egypt on the world stage. A year on, I was to find the girl and do an update. After a few phone calls in Cairo, I begged off the assignment: the girl was in hiding, fearing reprisals...
When Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) introduces his friends to his new girl--a life-size sex doll named Bianca--some folks have trouble accepting it. Brother Gus (Paul Schneider) is concerned that Lars found "a fiancé in a box." One guy mutters that Lars is "in love with that slutty hunk of silicone." But most of the other residents of this wintry Midwestern town go with the flow. They've been urging the cripplingly shy Lars to get a girlfriend. And this one is gorgeous enough to be an instant local celebrity; she looks like Angelina Jolie but smaller...
Lars and the Real Girl, which begins as a standard indie study of the sympathetic oddball, soon reveals itself as a gentle comedy of community. Prodded by the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), Gus and his pregnant wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) figure out that for Lars, Bianca is not a sex object but a love object--an outlet for the tenderness he has never been able to express and that his indulgent friends are thrilled to see bloom. Most movies celebrate the journey to another place. Lars pursues the counterargument--that most of us are defined by our past...
...setting, the slow pulse of north-country life, the locals' constipated cordiality. The story is a Lake Wobegon anecdote that Garrison Keillor would have told in 20 minutes, with a defter comic sense and more laughs. Even the movie's title could use some editing. Why not just Lars' Girl...
...coffee shop, talking to a Korean girl I’d befriended. She was angry about that day’s lecture in Summer School (it was a joint program with a Korean university), because she thought our professor went too easy on the Japanese. “I dunno,” I said, “I thought he was pretty balanced...