Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from being self-indulgent fluff, a perceptive and sharp wit prevents the songs from growing tiresome. On the opening track, Murdoch confides, "The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard. He took all of my sins, and he wrote a pocket novel called The State I Am In. And so I gave myself to God, there was a pregnant pause before he said OK. Now I spend my days turning tables round in Marks & Spencer's, they don't seem to mind." The narrator is less whiny than smug to point out his faults...
Eyes Wide Shut is difficult to summarize, but it's organization is practically identical to Schnitzler's novel (Kubrick's insistence on an "inspired by" credit for Schnitzler seems not only wrong, but ego-driven). Cruise and Kidman play Bill and Alice Harford, a couple that seemingly have it all--looks, boatloads of money, great sex, an adorable child and a London-esque apartment in New York City. When they attend an ostentatious Christmas ball thrown by a wealthy friend (Sydney Pollack), Alice gets plastered and finds herself dancing with a skeezy Hungarian player; he whispers cheesy pick-up lines...
...scenery and ends up choking bigtime. Her monologue should be the key to the movie--a thorough exploration of how unrealized emotions can inspire the most potent jealousy--and yet Kubrick has Alice on marijuana before she begins her speech. Why? Why cheapen the moment? In Schnitzler's novel, Alice is perfectly lucid; she virtually relives her erotic desires for the sailor as she recounts her lust. In the film, the exchange isn't balanced; Alice isn't rational, the emotions are cheapened, and the scene flops. Bill retaliates by diving into an underworld of sexual deviance that takes...
...literary genre born of the Internet. Its fast-paced narratives draw upon the target demographic's kinship with MTV, which has a joint venture with Pocket Books, and with the Internet and kids' ease in processing information in unconventional formats. Smack is told by multiple narrators. Monster, the latest novel by veteran children's book author Walter Dean Myers, is recounted in the form of a screenplay. Louis Sachar's Holes, last year's Newbery and National Book Award winner about a boy erroneously sent to a juvenile detention center, shuttles between past and present...
Chang and Eng: A Novel in Two Parts, based on the twins who emigrated in the 1840s from then Siam, is due out from Dutton next spring