Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This plot-centered approach can hurt the novel in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The Alienist, Caleb Carr's best seller about a serial killer on the loose in 1890s New York City (read by Edward Herrmann), makes an engrossing 4 1/2-hour tape. What is left out, however, is a good deal of the historical atmosphere, as well as many details of the laborious murder investigation. As a result, catching this serial killer seems as easy as a jog around Central Park...
...metaphor not just for the movie's plot -- Man's Fortunes Rise for No Apparent Reason -- but also for its box-office fortunes: in six weeks, Gump has floated to grosses of nearly $200 million...
...some of his platoon; others die; his lieutenant loses his legs. A certain horror attends the explosions and deaths but so does a strong feeling that things here are happening by the book. As indeed they are. The grunts have not died in vain: they have died as a plot device, to facilitate Gump's upward float -- and the film's apparent message: act decent, stay positive (brains optional), and everything will be fine...
...Forrest is hardly the first idiot hero to ride through a fiction, bodies dropping all around him. The Czechs celebrate the apparently obtuse Good Soldier Schweik, whereas in terms of plot Voltaire's Candide might have been a Gump pilot. Yet Schweik is not so much a defense of dumb optimism as an argument against militarism and a celebration of sly peasant smarts. And Candide may be literature's most ferocious send-up of cheeriness in the face of the world's cruelties. By its end, its battered hero has abandoned his opening premise that everything happens for the best...
Hollywood in the '30s and '40s is the novel's principal setting, though the ramified and exceedingly tenuous plot spreads across the U.S. and into the '90s. Dunne invents a child star named Blue Tyler (born Melba Mae Toolate, or perhaps not, because her birth mother is supposed to have sold her as an infant to a Mrs. Toolate for the price of a bus ticket out of -- maybe -- Yuma, Arizona). Blue isn't cute like Shirley Temple (that "midget in drag," as one of Dunne's wise-guy industry types calls Blue's competition). Rather, she conveys adult sexuality...