Word: railroad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MOVIES ALWAYS MAKE ME cry. Isn't that how the old pop song went? For a hundred years, moviemakers of no special talent have known that the simple act of putting a pretty thing in jeopardy--tying Sweet Sue to the railroad tracks, killing off Bambi's mom--will win an audience's hot tears and huzzahs. Sentiment, a human feeling or failing, is honorable; the uses to which it is often put are not. But that is for the individual viewer to judge. If a film touches you, you call it profound. If it has everyone around you sobbing...
DIED. FRANCOIS MITTERRAND, 79, former President of France; of cancer; in Paris. He was a man of frustrating arrogance, a man of contradictory impulses--but above all, as even his opponents acknowledged, Mitterrand was a man of France. The son of a railroad employee turned vinegar producer, Mitterrand went to Paris to study law in 1934. Drafted at the outbreak of World War II, he was imprisoned by the Germans in 1940. He escaped, co-founding a Resistance group with a network of ex-prisoners in 1943. After the liberation, he was elected to the National Assembly, and between...
...potential synergy between cops and residents works not only in big cities: Taylor, Texas, about 28 miles northeast of Austin, has just 13,300 people. But no place is too small for the drug trade. Five years ago, crack moved in among the cotton gins and railroad tracks, bringing with it assault, rape, car theft and murder. Crime got so bad that Mae Willie Turner, 79, and her sister, Gladys Hubbard, 73, could no longer sit at night on their front porch. "The place was infested," says Turner...
...joined other demonstrators on streets where the heaviest dealing happened. Stansbury got the town council to designate "downtown" Taylor as a historic district, which meant a ban on the public consumption of alcohol. The group even persuaded the Texas National Guard to bulldoze 48 worn-out buildings near the railroad tracks that had become weekend squats for drug dealers and their customers, who used to come in by car and train. Taylor these days is more like it used to be. "I can sit on my porch anytime now,'' says Mae Willie Turner...
Like most soap operas, this one wins hot tears from its audience by imagining the worst things that could happen to decent people. It ties its women to the railroad tracks of caprice and invites us to watch as a betraying beau comes chugging toward them. Waiting to Exhale doesn't have the idiot vigor to become a camp classic like the movie Valley of the Dolls. Forest Whitaker, a laid-back actor who directs this slow-fuse movie, lets his divas strut, smolder and tell off the skunks they once loved. This ain't art--it's more like...