Word: poisons
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Like much of Roman Polanski's work, The Tenant is a comedy tipped with poison. As in Rosemary's Baby or Cul de Sac, laughter comes as much from astonishment, even outrage, as it does from humor. Polanski has a carbolic wit and discovers unplumbed depths of amusement in emotional deformity, physical abuse and psychic shock waves. If Chinatown found Polanski in a slightly more mellow mood -owing probably to the keyed-down romanticism of Robert Towne's screenplay-The Tenant shoots him right back to the center ring of his absurdist circus...
...like caviar-an acquired taste that can easily lead to addiction. Dickinson, an ex-editor of Punch, does not make much of the process of detection, nor does he specialize in suspense. Instead, he neatly packs his books with such old-fashioned virtues as mood, character and research. The Poison Oracle (1974) is a good example. Set in an imaginary Arab kingdom, it delves into cultural anthropology (desert v. marsh Arabs) as well as fashionable psycholinguistics (in this case, how man communicates with chimpanzee). There is a murder, to be sure, whose only witness naturally turns...
Psycho, 5:40, 9:20 and Pretty Poison, 4, 7:40, ends today...
...Review of Books. The kind of person who furnishes his house in the built-for-children way that is the mark of the consumption-oriented hipster: stark white walls, huge plants and Coltrane records. At other times the same group is unbelievably activist, traveling the country and spreading its poison about this great land on every Midwest college campus with ersatz buildings and naive kids of our American yeomanry. The Intellectual is lazy and active, stupid and unbelievably cunning, lying and truthful--anything, so long as the image backs up the pseudoconspiracy Wolfe offers for his place on Reagan...
...independence showed nine of the colonies in favor, two (South Carolina and Pennsylvania) opposed, New York abstaining and Delaware deadlocked. To decide such momentous business?cutting much of a continent and its 2.5 million inhabitants free from the British Empire?the Congress hoped for virtual unanimity. Anything less might poison the enterprise with disunity. Hence the delegates' anxiety on the morning of July...