Word: rays
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Talk about your perfect storms! It's the week before Christmas, and Ray Eddy's husband has absconded with the money she was saving for her dream home - a double-wide trailer that seems like a mansion to her. She has a part-time job in a convenience store, the salary from which barely keeps her two kids in popcorn and orange drink, which is all they have for food. And that says nothing about her environment. She lives close to a casinoless Mohawk Indian reservation, near the Canadian border in upstate New York, where the snow is perpetual...
...miracles do happen. And Frozen River is one of them. That's largely - but not entirely - because Ray is played by Melissa Leo, who's at least a little bit known for her television appearances on Homicide: Life on the Streets. She contrives to look as weather-beaten as her front door and to act tough-minded without being closed-minded. She'd do anything to give her two kids a better, or at least a more hopeful, life. That, as it happens, includes smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada across the eponymous river...
...they do well - for a time. Then, naturally, they don't do so well. There's a suspenseful and near-horrific incident with a smuggled baby. There's an increasingly nosy state patrolman who may possibly have an inarticulate romantic interest in Ray. There's trouble with the Indians over Lila and her illegitimate baby and, of course, over the fact that she is breaking the law. And Ray's sons, both nice kids, are restive and in need of closer supervision. In the end, rough, but not draconian, justice is meted out to Ray, but a thin ray...
...Mehdi's car burned that morning, has been one of the most heavily secured roads in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has contracted a private British security firm, Global Strategies Group, to control a series of checkpoints leading up to the airport, with multiple ID checks and a car X-ray scan for explosives. At one checkpoint, passengers are asked to exit the car completely, leaving all doors open, including the trunk and hood, while Global security guards lead sniffer dogs around each car, checking inside and outside again for explosives...
...might have passed for an academic. Until, that is, he picked up the clarinet. Goodman's dedication was fierce. Nobody else in jazz played the clarinet with such technical brilliance or controlled emotion, and Goodman expected nothing less from his band. Musicians who fell short were subjected to ''the ray.'' ''He'd look over his glasses and stare at you --really nail you down with his eyes,'' remembers Vibraphonist Hampton, a member with Pianist Wilson and Drummer Gene Krupa of the seminal Goodman Quartet, which introduced a chamber-music approach to jazz. ''And all the time he'd be making...