Word: novelness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deep history that might curse us to this quest. We're a slightly amnesiac country. We were invented out of whole cloth fairly recently, and we're very dedicated to not looking at the past and very pointed to the future. America is kind of a science fiction novel in a way. Very weak on character and backstory, but very strong in concept and dynamism and cool ideas...
Apparently Shelton - and director F. Gary Gray (Friday, The Italian Job) - spent the last decade studying movies like Death Wish, the Saw series, The Brave One, Untraceable and other examples of revenge gorenography. The genre was launched with the 1962 Cape Fear (and its John D. MacDonald source novel), whose killer not only tracks down the lawyer who prosecuted him but terrorizes the man's wife and child. The movie's sobering climax - the lawyer refuses to kill the killer, because he will not be reduced, even in extremis, to his animal impulses - was rectified in the 1991 Martin Scorsese...
...late Brian Clough (Sheen), a soccer manager legendary for his success on the pitch as well as his penchant for the irreverent sound bite and a tendency, like Charles de Gaulle and Michael Jordan, to see his team as an extension of himself. Loosely based on the novel of the same name by David Peace, the film focuses on Clough’s ill-fated 44-day tenure as manager of Leeds United—“The Damned United” of the title and the most successful English soccer team of the time. Interspersed are flashbacks...
...Petrov wear their erudition on their sleeves in “The Golden Calf.” The novel is filled with cues from high and low culture—colorful and referential insults, classical literature, and cosmopolitan knowhow. One pretend madman, exercising freedom of speech as his alter ego declares, “Et tu, Brute, sold out the Bolsheviks!” The novel also takes particular interest in allusions to “The Brothers Karamazov,” and at one point Ostap conflates the story of Jason’s Golden Fleece with the titular...
...translators’ notes, it is mentioned that much of the humor that applied in Russian, does not work in English. Much of the wordplay and ridiculous names have been lost, yet the translators demonstrated incredible skill at bringing the non-idiomatic humor to the surface of the novel at all times...