Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jack Nicholson gets lost in the thickets of plot on his way back to Chinatown. -- With Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee gets mo' worse. -- David Lynch's Wild at Heart is weird all over...
...Sailor and his girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern) hightail it to New Orleans and Texas, where they encounter fat-lady porn stars and a slick psychopath (Willem Dafoe) who loses his head, literally and spectacularly, in a bank heist. To Barry Gifford's source novel Lynch adds a murder plot, an Elvis impersonation, a few torture scenes, a drug cartel, some cockroaches and a happy ending complete with deus ex machina. Not to mention frequent references to The Wizard of Oz, with which Wild has precisely nothing in common...
...flat-out comedy; he and his ensemble (including Diane Ladd and Crispin Glover) work at high pitch and have a swell time at it. Wild at Heart is also the first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent. You might go, "Ick!" but you won't ask, "Huh?" What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. Wild at Heart reveals a master of movie style on his way to becoming a mannerist...
...Jakes is no simple detective thriller whereby the case, however complicated, is solved by bizzare clues or outrageous coinicidence. The clues in this film (there is a bewildering number of them) becoming increasingly inconsequential as the plot progresses. What waxes important are the central characters: their lives and their complex, intimate psychological motivations...
While the book's plot is not always able to sustain suspense, Turow's style is perhaps the book's most consistent and sturdy feature. Turow writes simply and directly, with sentences that rarely extend for more than two lines. But though they are short, he packs a lot of description into them. Occasionally, Turow carries an extended metaphor that is pithily expressive; he once ties together in one paragraph Clara's preoccupation with music and death...