Word: isabel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this two-hour film, Isabel Allende's complex, stylish novel has of necessity been stripped to its working parts. Yet the thing works in its goofy way, mainly because Bille August (of Pelle the Conqueror) is a man of apparently dauntless conviction. He has written and directed every scene with serene authority, somehow compelling your belief in what he's doing through his own sublime self-confidence...
...graduating from Mount Holyoke College, but wanted to earn her credentials outside the fold. This she did, impressively, with the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution. She carried on the family tradition by marrying another journalist, Tim Smith, now an editor at the Wall Street Journal. (Their latest collaboration: Isabel, three months, who joins 3 1/2-year-old Anthony...
...Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, and a novel which moves naturally between dreams; myth and reality, skillfully weaving together magic and politics in an epic Latin American tale, somehow flops in the jump to the movie screen, where writer and director Bille August creates a confusing jumble of characters and story lines, capturing none of the magic or fluidity of Allende's book...
Benitez does not appear to have developed a style of her own, relying far too much on the Isabel Allende school of magical realism. The frequent references to the power of Story--"In her hut, Remedios listens to someone's story, and the teller is revived"--is reminiscent of Allende's story-telling Eva Luna...
...future dead white male, Updike makes mischief with a changing world that unsettles his sensibilities and excites his imagination. In a spasm of Latin American magic realism, he turns Isabel into a black lesbian and Tristao into a white businessman. A tirelessly inventive tour de force, this off-color romance may not add much to Updike's stature as a man of letters, but it is a spectacular example of what happens when a writer with talent to burn burns...