Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
...behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure or begin to achieve Coppola's loftier goal of charting Willard's tailspin into psychological terror. Eventually, the voice-over commentary becomes a makeshift panacea for the film's many other defects: it hastily clarifies plot points and states themes that Coppola has uncharacteristically failed to develop through action, dialogue and pictures. This strategy is as hopeless as trying to glue together a $30 million airplane with wads of bubble...
...essential Bowles plot charts a clash between two cultures, one usually Western and the other primitive. Primitive almost always gets the home court advantage; Bowles favors settings in North Africa, near the deadly lure of the Sahara, or in stifling, vegetation-choked places in Mexico or South America. Visitors come to feast on the picturesque and take one step too many off the beaten path. From that point on, they are more truly on their own than they ever dreamed possible. Sometimes their fate is terrible. In A Distant Episode, a linguistics professor studying North African dialects stumbles foolishly into...
According to the plot of the $1.8 million film, which will probably air early next year, two young couples who climb mountains on weekends are caught in an avalanche. One of the men is killed, and the three survivors are trapped on a tiny ledge, with nothing but frigid air and a glacier beneath them. An Army helicopter spots them, but when it angles down for a rescue, it bangs into the side of the mountain and crashes to the ice below...
...tenth movie, Die Laughing, Robby Benson, 23, is practically the entire show. He stars, wrote the script with his father Jerry Segal, and composed five songs for the score. Benson plays a cabbie trapped in an espionage plot who is lucky enough to have Elsa Lanchester, 76, as a sort of guardian angel. Her explanation of her role is vintage Lanchester: "You see, I have to go up into the California vineyards in an effort to help Robby, who's been caught by alien agents because his monkey that I'm taking care of has the secret...