Word: primal
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They were weeping because literature had done what it does best: define a catastrophe in human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help...
...sandy shores some twelve miles northwest of Cape May, N.J. Lugging cameras, British journalists fly here to film the fecund scene. Japanese scientists gawk at the colossal display of concupiscence. American entrepreneurs profit from it. Biologists study it, and schoolchildren puzzle over it. Oblivious, the crabs just do their primal thing...
Unless your childhood was as magical as Mozart's, writing an extended memoir of those primal years is a risk bordering on chutzpah. Why on earth should anyone else care about the assorted teachers, neighbors and maiden aunts who were your early sources of inspiration? Such people are the private memories of the ones who knew and cherished them...
...taupou, or ceremonial virgin. A U.S. Army man appears amid a group of spear- shaking warriors in lavalava skirts, fierce tattoos on many thighs. A former Hollywood bit actor resumes his role as the "talking chief" of Leone, leading his villagers through hymn-inflected island chants and primal dances. And then, just before Governor Peter Coleman, Congressman Eni Faleomavaega and various other dignitaries get ready to join in the final swaying dance, a village chorus sits on the ground, chants its age-old traditions and dramatically, for its climax, flashes -- what else? -- an American flag...
...KINISON: HAVE YOU SEEN ME LATELY? (Warner Bros.). Abusive, scurrilous and hilarious: post-punk comedy meets primal-scream therapy. Offensive? You betcha. But there are wonderful bits about sexism and heartbreak, as well as the best riffs on organized religion since Lenny Bruce...