Word: realisms
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This is not just because the actors on these shows are so attractive—though that helps. The appeal of these programs is not their realism, but the element of fantasy: lives that superficially resemble our own could be filled with experiences far more vivid and dramatic than those that actually occur. Just once, I wanted my life to be that compelling...
...will sense immediately where Devils & Dust is headed, largely because the Boss has left his boot prints on this territory before, most famously on 1982's Nebraska and 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad. Those albums chronicled closed lives in open spaces with the kind of ascetic social realism you might find in a particularly earnest newspaper series, but they also had Springsteen's venerable empathy to warm them up and dramatize them. Fact and feeling mingle again on Devils, but not always in the proper proportion. The boxer on The Hitter who passes his estranged ma's house...
...among those on its 64-member faculty, Harvard has become the leading C.L.S. center. "The battle is fiercer here than elsewhere," says Kennedy, who jokingly refers to himself and the others as "the unholy triumvirate." Less a coherent philosophy than an angle of inquiry, C.L.S. has roots in "legal realism," whose supporters in the 1920s and '30s began to argue that legal precedents could be found to support either side of most cases, and that judicial decisions depended less on the abstract "science" of law than on judges' personal predispositions, beliefs and prejudices...
Family dramas are always an invitation to fine ensemble acting, and these players are up to it. Hackman brings life to realism as effectively as he brings realism to fantasy in Target. Burstyn clarifies her character without oversimplifying. She finds both repose and luminosity in Kate. Madigan is not afraid to let the audience dislike her abrasiveness, while Sheedy uses patience and stillness as a counterpoise. Only Ann-Margret is somewhat shortchanged by the script: her motives are never made fully clear. Sometimes, too, the movie feels overly tidy and pleased with its own humanism. But it unashamedly keeps scratching...
...hostile words: he lifted the ineffective grain embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed on Soviet trade after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Ever since, the Administration's policy toward the Soviet Union has had a typically Reaganesque twist: harsh ideological rhetoric tempered by moves rooted in an emerging realism. The inconsistency has caused relations between the two superpowers to blow hot and cold. Mostly, they have blown cold...