Word: kyra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PHENOMENON (July 3). The morphing is metaphorical here: a regular Joe (Travolta) is zapped with psychic powers and an Einstein IQ. Naturally, he's a freak to be avoided, except by one (Kyra Sedgwick) who loves him. Sounds sappy, but could work: director Jon Turteltaub has fashioned some improbable hits (Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping), and Travolta is a perpetual charm machine...
Enthusiasts insist that science as yet lacks the tools to properly assess homeopathy and that its effectiveness should be taken on trust. "If you don't have faith in the healing, it won't work," says Kyra Walsh, owner of Walsh Homeopathics in Evanston, Illinois. "Belief is a part of the process...
That's true. Candido and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, decent folk down on their luck, huddle in a makeshift camp in the canyon and climb out every morning to find work at a labor exchange. But the sight of hungry Mexicans spooks Kyra's clients, and she sees to it that the exchange is shut. Delaney's liberal beliefs crumble, and he votes with other residents to build a wall, with a gate, around their development. The author, mistrusting his skill and the reader's acuteness, relentlessly flashes irony alerts. Candido gets work constructing the wall, knowing well...
...novel, The Tortilla Curtain (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95), botches a good theme: the shuddering distaste of California's patio-living Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. His pale hero is Delaney, a nature writer who has moved with his wife Kyra, a real estate shark, to a housing development above Topanga Canyon. Delaney is not just politically correct, he's politically exquisite, but when a Mexican man, Candido, blunders in front of his white Acura on a canyon road, his reaction is angry revulsion: the wounded wet back, to whom he gives...
...with the past that made her what she is--a woman too emotionally guarded and self-denying for her own good. Dad (Robert Duvall) is the soft-drawling dictator of a prosperous domain. Mom (Gena Rowlands) is the perpetual placater, for whom niceness is a moral imperative. Big Sister (Kyra Sedgwick) has a tough but funny tongue and, one guesses, a damaged soul...