Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tobias Wolff's subtle, vivid memoir, This Boy's Life, was converted into a one-track movie centered on the loutish, vicious behavior of Wolff's stepfather, played by Robert De Niro. Fried Green Tomatoes, released in 1991, was a masterpiece of artfully soft-edged propaganda, a regular Birth of a Nation of antimale bias: almost all the male characters were brutes or fools or slobs except for a mute, guardian black giant, who was a sort of eunuch figure, and a sainted brother who died an awful death when young and innocent, and a little...
Because "In the Name of the Father" is based on Gerry Conlan's memoir, Proved Innocent, it does not have an idyllic tone. No one is glorified in this movie. Gerry is stubborn and immature throughout, and Gareth cannot control herself in court. She screams at the judge and the witness about the injustices her clients have suffered...
...while the city is no longer the "Genet vision of hell" that John Gregory Dunne described in his book Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season 20 years ago, it is still, for the moment, a stranger place than Omaha or Sacramento or Worcester or even Atlantic City, if only because there are so many cheerfully offered temptations to lose the tuition and so many normal-looking people flirting feverishly with that risk. The mobs on the casino floors are in a kind of murmuring trance, each middle-aged housewife or young lawyer at the slots or the poker tables...
...main thing wrong with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Simon's affectionate memoir of those days, is that this manic style of writing, which he vividly recalls in conversation, is never really seen onstage. The play, which opened on Broadway last week, will delight Simon fans who yearn for the days when he wrote to be funny, without the poignant self-analysis that has enriched such late works as Broadway Bound and Jake's Women. For those who admire these later plays and think he found in them his great theme -- the making of a writer and the moral conundrums...
...selling memoir turns foes to pulp, gives friends raptures...