Word: rottenness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hughes' second film, The Breakfast Club, the mood is edgier and more combative: you and you and you and you and me against the whole rotten adult world. Five high schoolers--a jock (Emilio Estevez), a rebel (Judd Nelson), a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), a beatnik (Ally Sheedy) and a princess (Molly)-- spend a Saturday in detention. All they have in common are secret sins, an ache for camaraderie and a festering resentment of parental and school domination. There is little music, not much action, just kids sitting around talking. Good talk, though. The brain, ragged by the rebel...
...Caspar Weinberger, a Harvard graduate, is met with rotten eggs and racuous protest. Thus last spring, a South African diplomat was blockaded at Lowell House, and a sit-in disrupted business at 17 Quincy St. And while students in the Committee on Central America did not themselves disrupt the speech by a Contra rebel this spring, they were hardly critical after it was broken up by other protesters...
This poet is a hard taskmaster. He wants his readers to clear their senses of the cant and iconography that fog perceptions. His highest value is individualism as evolved by Western civilization. He skips through history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account...
Nearly everyone on this set seems to have an entertainingly mean mouth. The old director proves a match for his son when it comes to exchanging insults: "Some people are brought up in poverty," he notes casually, "and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes." And when Dongan Lowndes, who has fallen heavily off the wagon, says that "the world can get on quite well" without a film version of his novel, Walker offers a laconic thought: "If we get into what the world can do without . . . God knows where...
...best parts of Hawksmoor are the evocations of 18th century London street life, with its whores and beggars, its hordes of homeless, its "Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch." In the eerie interplay between the earlier age and our own, Ackroyd has fashioned a fictional architecture that is vivid, provocative and as clever as, well, the devil...