Word: lawness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...What Have I Done to Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy where she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock the Borgias. And that's just for appetizers. The one aesthetic commandment of this Spanish writer-director might read...
With Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987), Almodovar displayed his brazen assurance of style and vaulted from comic realism to soap-operatic mannerism. Matador is a contemporary vampire story: an ex-bullfighter and a woman lawyer, believing that death is the ultimate climax, impale each victim on the cold steel of their lust. Law of Desire draws a bent triangle: a gay movie director, his transsexual sister (Maura) and her adopted child's rightful mother (played by a Spanish drag queen). Revelations of murder, incest, suicide and lotsa hot sex follow, but the tone remains knowing, tender. As Matador...
...Law of Desire and other Almodovar films take many cues from homoerotic cinema, from the fascination with lust and death that animated certain films of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, John Waters and R.W. Fassbinder. But Almodovar also looks back in glamour to '50s Hollywood, when Rock Hudson could comfort a dying Jane Wyman in one film, then woo perky Doris Day in another. Thus his pictures are both bleakly comic and defiantly romantic, hipper than tomorrow and nostalgic for a pre-AIDS era when love's most toxic complication was a broken heart. "To classify movies is to impoverish them...
...most of the disputes between Jackson and Michael Dukakis, the four men gathered for a breakfast summit. One issue defied resolution: the nature of the "partnership" that Jackson was demanding. Finally Brown explained it as a language gap. Dukakis and Brountas interpreted partnership as if they were discussing a law firm. For Jackson, the term implied common goals and respect. Brown, a partner in one of Washington's most powerful law firms who began his career as an organizer with the National Urban League, helped break the impasse...
When he returned to the U.S., he became Whitney Young's protege at the Urban League, where he ran a job-training program. At night he attended law school at St. John's University. There he forged a bond with a teacher the other students considered intimidating, Mario Cuomo. "We had an instant rapport," says Brown. Cuomo, who endorsed Brown's candidacy early on, agrees. When Vernon Jordan took over the Urban League in 1971, he persuaded Brown to move to Washington to take over the organization's office there...