Word: realisms
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...follow him throughout childhood, a time punctuated both by the drama of war and illness and by the monotony of school and girls. The gritty realism of Gray’s writing persists through his sketches of unlikable characters, ambiguous moments, and unsatisfying conclusions: Thaw’s early love affairs, for one, are not simply tragic or unrequited, but rather attempted, abandoned, unresolved, and forgotten, with none of the conclusive flair that readers have come to expect in a novel. Such literary decisions culminate in a story that is all the more compelling for its seeming incompleteness...
Interestingly, Gray chooses to enclose this achievement of realism within a frame narrative that is pure fantasy. The story of Lanark, a young amnesiac who inhabits a strange, dystopian world, neatly bookends Thaw’s. The two narratives never directly intersect: to Lanark, Thaw is only a character in a story told to him in a hospital (admittedly, a story that takes up two hundred pages...
...sister, his first victim is his blind mother, and his second victim is his mentally disabled epileptic brother. It’s an audacious directorial debut, particularly for Italy in 1965, still trying to stitch itself together after the war and, cinematically, completely in the thrall of neo-realism, which was just beginning to peter out. Along with Bernardo Bertolucci’s debut, released the year before, “Fists” heralded a new period in Italian cinema. But, “Fists” is also entertaining, even now. Families are often embarrassing...
American fiction is in asatirical mood. Sometime in the 1990s--David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest makes a handy point of reference for weary travelers-- the earnest, rock-hewn realism of the Raymond Carver school gave way to a more fluid, molten hyperrealism. The widespread conviction that truth has become stranger than fiction triggered a kind of strangeness inflation, an arms race of exaggeration, wherein novelists satirically augment and amp up and overclock their fictions in an attempt to keep up with the sheer implausibility of real life...
...friendships to emerge. Weitz says that he “really enjoys working with actors.” As opposed to the image of uptight directors, Weitz finds actors to contribute to a “calm and creative atmosphere.” “So much realism can come from these actors,” says Weitz, who was particularly impressed with Chris Klein (“American Pie”), the army veteran boyfriend of Sally. Having also worked alongside Quaid and Grant before, Weitz says he was thrilled that they were both willing to come aboard...