Word: mattered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time on stage. She places Angels in America where it belongs: in a complete moral universe of heroic risks, mutable ethics and terrible punishments. Altman's most recent directing project, last spring's revival of Mamet's Oleanna, was a wobbly production that tried to let its controversial subject matter speak for itself; it didn't. Here, however, she shows a sureness of perspective that recalls that other Altman, Robert, the filmmaker behind the human panoramas of Short Cuts and Nashville, and whose name has, in fact, long been mentioned to bring Angels to the screen...
That's the thing about Dinosaur Jr.--no matter how old we get, they're still playing the same Seattle style garage sounds that endeared them to our generation back when we were entering puberty. At the same time, though, new pieces like "Mick" and "Alone" put a refreshing spin on the old depressed-and-oppressed-in-America theme...
Danes, meanwhile, is inconceivably wrapped up in the film's mock-seriousness. At one point after Daisy's mother tells her to get rid of all her excess books, she shrieks, "But mom, books are life!" The remark, like many other such lines, invariably provokes laughter. No matter how much expression Danes infuses into each of her inane sentences, her efforts to add complexity to Daisy's underwritten character are hopeless and inescapably pathetic...
...Night Stand charts the effects of a casual infidelity on the life and marriage of a commercial director, admirably portrayed by Wesley Snipes. Although it lapses towards the end, it is better than most Hollywood fare in dealing with its provocative subject matter. The film attempts to address the issues of adultery and loss intelligently, and doesn't make the mistake of sensationalizing the interracial relationships (Snipes cheats on his Asian-American wife with a white woman) at its center. However it is far from equal to Vegas, or Figgis' earlier films Internal Affairs and the lesser-known noir confection...
...Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a fairly easy read--little seems to have been lost in Jay Rubin's excellent translation. Each chapter, with such titles as "An Inquiry into the Nature of Pain" and "The Story of the Monkeys of the Shitty Island," has enough comedy and matter-of-fact prose to keep the narrative moving along quickly. However, beneath the deceptive surface-simplicity, the novel is so richly textured that it deserves repeated reading. Filled with brilliant throwaway lines ("her voice like a little broom sweeping off the dust that had piled up on the slates...