Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel opens starkly--'They shoot the white girl first'--and then coils back and forth through a century of imagined history to explain who 'they' are and why, on a dewy Oklahoma morning in 1976, they felt compelled to storm a decaying mansion and wreak violence on the handful of women living within...
...those who pretended to hate the scandal. She served as a hired spy for Richard Nixon's factotums on George McGovern's press plane in 1972; every night she reported back the latest (and by all accounts politically worthless) gossip. She is the author of a series of racy novels about sex and intrigue--"chick stuff," she calls them. As a literary agent she has specialized in pariahs and troublemakers: Mark Fuhrman; Watergate figure Maurice Stans; Prince Charles' gabby valet; and Dolly Kyle Browning, a high school friend of the President's who wrote a novel about their alleged decades...
...Private Ryan, the flinty, competent G.I.s have a clear mission. The Thin Red Line, from James Jones' 1962 novel, is about military and moral chaos. Its infantrymen are scared and unprepared for the hilltop assault that consumes most of the film. (The Japanese are scared...
...Sweet Hereafter, A Simple Plan). And they revere Nick Nolte, who has a lock on the role of the tough man--out of sorts, time and control--in a world with no use for his strengths. No surprise, then, that Affliction, Paul Schrader's film from a Russell Banks novel about family violence in New Hampshire, has placed strongly in the year-end critics' polls, and that Nolte won some Christmas laurels as best actor...
When all is finally lost, it's the failure to honor tradition, not the dopiness of clinging to it, that's blamed. Sam Peckinpah, who loved to celebrate bad-boyishness, apparently tried for years to adapt Max Evans' 1961 novel to the screen. It says something about the reach and persistence of decaying myth that British director Stephen Frears, creator of such eccentric delights as My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters, has succumbed to it. There's no need to follow his example...