Word: plot
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...Unkindness of Ravens (Pantheon; 245 pages; $15.95) by Ruth Rendell marries the two disparate strains in her writing: the slow psychological disintegration of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and conventional detection by kindly Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and his younger deputy Mike Burden. The plot involves bigamy and incest and probes the links between feminism and lesbianism. As is almost always true in a Rendell narrative, things are considerably simpler than they at first seem. Her portrait of the killer is a classic Christie-style evocation of narcissistic...
Smith is interested in her plot, but she is fascinated by her people. Not judging, just watching in an amiable way, she gives us Sybill, prim, quivering with repression, afraid that the hypnotist is a fake, terrified that he is not. She shows us another daughter, a hairdresser named Candy, happily and efficiently shampooing her dead mother's hair, and working in a little White Mink to dull out the yellow. She hears clearly the grouchy yap of Teenager Sean, driven loony by parent effectiveness: "I mean you come home from school really pissed about something . . . and they say something...
...also had the inspiration, radical by the standards of recent musicals, to keep his dancers' feet in the film frame, and to hold a shot long enough to anchor the loping rhythms of Choreographer Twyla Tharp. Hines taps and boogies--and acts--his way out of some preposterous plot contrivances, and Isabella Rossellini and Helen Mirren bring urgent dignity to their satellite roles...
...been written by someone without an influential spouse to her name. It has most of what blockbusters require these days: sex from the female perspective, an unfulfilled mother and her itchy daughters, and a sympathetic weather system that delivers up heat waves and thunderstorms whenever the plot requires them...
...youth. Lately a touch of career and financial independence is not out of place. The three soap-opera actresses in Secrets manage to be both busy professionals and powerful love goddesses. The most impressive of the trio converts a homosexual into her lover and father of her child. The plot deals with how these women eventually pair off with three male colleagues. As in the soaps, beauty is not the only thing that is skin deep. Steel and/ or her editors are adept at turning banalities into pleasantries and serious problems like birth defects and murder into inconveniences. The obsession...