Word: quotidian
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...BOOK WAS BETTER: Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar were really rather dull fellows, and their family lives, when they were in the movie's flatlands (which was most of the time), were drearily miserable in predictable ways. Proulx merely touched contrastingly on that quotidian aspect of their existence and kept the focus on their increasingly tormented romance...
...That quotidian depiction of terrorism has made Paradise Now controversial, not just among Israelis. "Extremist Palestinians say by humanizing these people, there is nothing holy in them," says Abu-Assad. "My opinion is they are human beings, whether you like it or not." And like it or not, the need to understand them didn't begin with 9/11, nor will it end anytime soon...
...disappointing result in the German election, but environmentalism remains a core European value. And there, perhaps, is the point. So much of '60s dogma has become mainstream that young Europeans have nothing to protest about. Rebellion has been transformed into angst. The politics of passion has given way to quotidian worries about jobs, pay and pensions. (You can't despise capitalism and enjoy the consumerist heaven to which young Europeans aspire.) Grand schemes no longer engender devotion - or, if they do, do so for a brief moment, preferably one (like this year's Live 8 concerts) that involves rock music...
...film American Splendor, based on his comix series. As anyone who watched that splendid movie knows, Pekar led a fairly unremarkable life as a Cleveland file clerk until he decided to turn that very mundaneness into comic art. Hiring others to illustrate his non-fiction vignettes of such quotidian occurrences as starting a car in the winter or talking with co-workers, Pekar's stories were driven by his intensely cranky, neurotic, highly-intelligent and, above all, hilarious personality. But the one thing Pekar never explored, until now, was how he got that way. The Quitter takes Harvey back...
...returns the money before closing time. Fred Wagner, a copywriter for a mail-order catalog and a would-be novelist, is the sort of wimp whose wife of four years would leave him out of "contempt for his habitual failure to claim justice from the petty tyrants of quotidian life." One day he discovers that he can simply will himself, and anything he is touching, into invisibility and back again. This gift enables him to learn more than he wants to know about other people's private lives, but it cannot save him from messing up his own. He soon...