Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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First, it gets the texture right, from the Cabinet meetings presided over with brusque efficiency by Perkins to the crowd of reporters that provides a constant heckling chorus. The plot is imaginative but plausible, just a half- step beyond today's headlines. When the power workers' union goes on strike to protest Perkins' economic plans, soccer stadiums are plunged into darkness and the nation into harsh second thoughts about the new regime. Later, to dramatize his views on disarmament, Perkins arranges to have a nuclear weapon dismantled on live TV. "I once tried middle of the road," he tells...
...miscellany of bits and pieces like Manhattan's Plaza Hotel ($400 million), "one of the great diamonds of the world." And the 76-acre plot along the Hudson that may or may not become Trump City. And Mar-a-Lago, the $7 million, 118-room Palm Beach, Fla., hideaway originally built by Marjorie Merriweather Post, with its elaborate Moorish arches, its private golf course and its 400 ft. of beach. (Mrs. Post originally bequeathed the place to the U.S. Government for visiting chiefs of state, but it was rejected as too expensive.) And the 47-room weekend cottage in Greenwich...
...LYRE OF ORPHEUS by Robertson Davies (Viking; $19.95). The third novel in a trilogy about the life and aftereffects of an eccentric Canadian millionaire. An engaging plot involving high finance, grand opera and a voice from Limbo...
This is one of Mississippi Burning's two main fictional conceits: that the FBI broke the case in part by locating not the fear and greed of a Klan informant, but the flinty, vindictive soul of Southern integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene...
...Broadway record -- as musical numbers, costly scenery, characters and whole subplots came and went. On some nights more than a hundred paying customers left at intermission or even during the performance. One couple who marched up the aisle during the second act seemed particularly weary of a plot device that has the hero, a tap-dancing gang leader, repeatedly fake his own murder. As the departing woman looked back at the stage, she whispered, "He's alive again." Muttered her companion: "Better he should have stayed dead...