Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...case it looks as if we can now call it a day for stage and movie adaptations of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's intricate, instructive novel of sexual gamesmanship among the 18th century French aristocracy. For Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere, while fiddling with the plot of this deliciously nasty tale, have studiously embalmed its spirit. Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures...
...section, students usually stick to plot summaries and close readings of the texts. Personal experiences play virtually no role in interpretation. But we still manage to have protracted discussions--employing several dozen "those people"--that usually skirt around the bigger social issues. For example, during a half-hour discussion of Carver's "Cathedral," nobody proposed that the story might be about prejudice. Instead we discussed the problems of communication between one man and his wife...
...return on a full moon -- that's why the spectral energy is gathering ^ . . ."). But the show delivers a stronger dose of pure horror than anything else on TV. In the season's two-hour premiere episode, Lucifer tried to take over a convent in France. Before the overstuffed plot spun out of control, there were some startling set pieces: a possessed nun literally climbing the walls and patients in a mental ward going wild and murdering the staff. The show also managed to write one of its regular characters out of the series in possibly the screwiest manner...
...swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their own words created forces that will try to destroy them...
...expertise, Casaubon is hired as a consultant to advise on the endless stream of Templar manuscripts that flood the editorial offices. Eventually, these three scoffers find an amusing way to waste their time. Using Belbo's new word processor, they concoct "the Plan," a plausible scenario revealing a Templar plot to unleash unimaginable powers from the center of the earth in order to rule the world...