Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Screen dreams are strangest and strongest when they hit close to home. In Terence Davies' searing memoir of his working-class family in Liverpool 30 and 40 years ago, mystery resides in the vision of his mother, magically poised on the hall sill, washing the outside windows ("Don't fall, Mom. Please don't fall"). Laughter erupts from three colleens parodying a Nat King Cole hit ("They tried to sell us egg foo yung"). The recollected terror of a vicious father can be tempered by his early death. The daughter who vowed, "If I ever...
...which he was living was destroyed by a bomb; near the end of his stay in Jerusalem, as he was being driven to a farewell lunch by his wife, his car windshield was shattered by a thrown rock. Such experiences add dizzying moments to Friedman's crowded, fascinating memoir...
Unless your childhood was as magical as Mozart's, writing an extended memoir of those primal years is a risk bordering on chutzpah. Why on earth should anyone else care about the assorted teachers, neighbors and maiden aunts who were your early sources of inspiration? Such people are the private memories of the ones who knew and cherished them...
...seem almost innocent in comparison with what has followed him up the charts and into the hearts of adolescents during the past three decades. Even the act that shattered his career -- marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin Myra (the script is based on her as-told-to memoir) -- is something we now feel compelled to "understand," if not endorse...
...Haydn or Mozart for this earnest foursome. Works by Charles Ives and Anton Webern are probably the creakiest items in their wide, of-today repertoire. It ranges from Steve Reich's Different Trains, in which synthesized voices, recorded railroad sounds and minimalist arpeggios are combined in a haunting memoir, to a growling, down- and-dirty setting of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze...