Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Douglas Day Stewart's script has little use for the novel's other plot line: Hester's difficulty with her love child Pearl. But this Hester is readier to be martyr and lover than seamstress and mother. She is, you see, America's prototype feminist. (Caucasian feminist, that is--Pocahontas, in the Disney cartoon, beat Hester to the p.c. punch.) And the Rev, weak in the novel, is now a fiery film hero, deserving of the preposterous happy ending the filmmakers tack...
...Demi Moore in the movie) was the first woman in literature with her own rating: A, for adultery. She had an affair with the colony's preacher (Gary Oldman) and, while enduring her public shame, fought off the pernitions of her long-lost husband Roger (Robert Duvall). But this plot doesn't kick in until about the 11th or 12th hour of the film. Director Roland Joffe dwells instead on the nude bodies of Moore (caressing herself) and Oldman (skinny-dipping) as Hester and the Rev fall in lust. And stay around for their epochally silly sex scene. It makes...
...composers, he produces songs that are both detachable and undetachable from the shows they appear in. Detachable because his lyrics are, in their wit and dexterity, satisfyingly autonomous; they appear in anthologies of light verse and books of contemporary poetry. Undetachable because his songs, usually integrated tightly into the plot line, often lose resonance on their own. It's no accident that Sondheim has originated only one tune--Send in the Clowns--that can be sure of raising a roar of recognition when its opening bars waft through any cocktail lounge in the country...
...most interesting shot in the movie is of Chinese men spreading out mah-jong tiles. The tiles slide around the tables like a whirlpool suggesting the smooth, swirling plot the movie should have had. But we quickly return to our world of five mile-per-hour car chases and a fool chase involving Angie Everheart which, although almost anything is better with Angie Everheart than it would be without her, is awfully disappointing...
Written in the year before her death, Persuasion is Jane Austen's darkest novel. The plot is similar to those of Emma and Pride and Prejudice. A sensible and intelligent woman overcomes her own character flaws and the interference of her family and friends to marry the only man who is her equal...