Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...planned for us. When our parents arrived on campus, we frantically introduced them to everyone in sight--every occupant of our entryways, everyone from our freshman seminars, the random girl we had a nice conversation with in the dining hall the previous week. Just as we confused setting with plot, showing our parents empty buildings as if they had something important to do with us, we confused novelty with friendship and bragged to our parents that we had made dozens of new friends...
...both Freshman and Junior Parents' Weekends, parents see nothing. The first time they visit, we can't show them anything. The second time, we don't want to show them anything. College is now merely a backdrop for our lives, a setting for our own personal characters and plot. But luckily for those who still look forward to seeing family, these parents' weekends actually don't have that much to do with college at all. Your parents are not here to see Harvard; they're here to see you. Get them to take you out for dinner...
...blackboard, he chalks the elements of a short story: "character, language, situation, structure, plot." He does not add "drugs, booze, angry sex, bar fighting, class resentment, familial dysfunction." The kids will learn to chord this country music on their own. Or not. Now they seem shy and tentative. The professor tries to loosen them up: "A good writer steals from other writers," he says. "Got to be willing to steal, to pillage." Got to be willing, Russell Banks might say to himself, to be merely very good in novel after novel while critics use words like talented and valuable...
Since the mental calendar of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen is often turned back to the 1940s, Dude is a shambling version of Philip Marlowe, the incomprehensible plot and the all-too-comprehensible visual references homages to the film-noir tradition--as if we needed more. Happily, however, the Coens have established a tradition of their own: deeply weird characters (let John Goodman's great portrait of one of those paranoid know-it-alls who actually know nothing stand for the mad multitude this movie contains) embedded in profoundly banal settings (much of the film is set in a bowling...
...admires Amanda (Heather Locklear) "because she knows what she wants and she gets it. I love the fact that she's bitchy." Murphy and her roommates also watch to keep up with fashion, commenting about which styles work. Furthermore, the group emphasizes the importance of predicting plot twists, such as Allison leaving Billy at the altar, and Kimberly exposing her bald head after her car accident...