Word: randomly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Morris tries, almost successfully, to balance the amount of commentary and observation--political and social--with a fair amount of cute little anecdotes about her spur-of-the-moment picnics on the Swiss hillsides or her random run-ins with Margaret Thatcher on a busy street...
...book is a collection of interrelated anecdotes, connected in sequence by the randomizing effects of memory and passing association. While the random nature of these connections often leads the narrative in diverging directions, the author unites these threads by relating his experiences while searching for information about his aristocratic forebears in the town of Koltsovo. The inhabitant's voices, past and present, are brought into clear focus through their interactions with the author or through the letters and journal entries that they left behind...
...precondition of his structure, in turn, was drawing. Diebenkorn drew incessantly. It wasn't only that he belonged to the last generation of American artists to be raised in a culture of drawing. He loved the act. Drawing was sifting the world's disorder. It was making sense of random agglomerations of things, unconscious postures of the body. (In all his drawings and paintings of his wife Phyllis, you only rarely get the sense that she was actually posing.) Every painter has favorite shapes and gestures, which, unless they encounter some resistance, can turn into mannerisms. Diebenkorn's style certainly...
...conflict or plausibility in the story is a concern that Coppola doesn't seem worried by. Indeed, he has done something unforgivable with Rainmaker. He has made John Grisham--the king of popcorn thrillers--lethally boring. There is no shameless entertainment here, no chance to be swept up in random plot twists or instant thrills. Instead, what we get is two hours of disjointed storytelling--without a touch of drama...
...film doesn't shirk from conveying the keen sense that in the face of so much agony, an act of compassion had as random an impact in saving a life as did the mortar shells in ending so many. No one is left heartened by a false sense that good somehow triumphed in Sarajevo...