Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exploits of Boyce and Lee, who were arrested and convicted in 1977, inspired a bestselling book by Robert Lindsey and now John Schlesinger's movie version. In An Englishman Abroad, the 1983 BBC-TV film he directed from Alan Bennett's script, Schlesinger painted a wry, rueful portrait of the British spy--Guy Burgess, retired to Moscow--as a displaced person, isolated from his best friends and instincts. Chris Boyce (Timothy Hutton) feels isolated too, trapped in America; but here Schlesinger dares not flirt with political or visual subtlety. Everyone is an oaf but our lad. Mom (Joyce Van Patten...
...Senator John Tower. Gramm, who became a Republican in 1983, wears as a badge of honor his label as a co-author of Reagan's budget and tax-cutting legislation in 1981. He harps on his association with the President so often that Doggett was finally moved to rueful complaint. Said he: "President Reagan's neck is probably a little sore because Phil Gramm has been hanging around it." Their exchanges are not always so mild. When Doggett secretly taped a telephone conversation with his opponent about ending their mutually negative ad campaign in favor of more positive...
HOSPITALIZED. Liza Minnelli, 38, effervescent singer-actress; for treatment of alcohol and Valium problems; at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Minnelli's newly acknowledged difficulties evoke rueful comparisons with her mother, Judy Garland, who suffered from drug and alcohol addiction for much of her life...
...author is more relaxed and rueful about the previous decade or so. The material is so firmly under control that only a few strokes-Frances Landau's "slightly hyperthyroid face," Paul Christian's saying, "Sorry, I've made other plans" to people wishing him a nice day-are needed to fill out a character. One is left to ponder why Didion nudges the reader so, insisting that her story keeps getting away from her. The truth may be that she is reluctant to let go of it, and of times that were full of imaginative and moral...
Learning to Crawl fixes on birth, innocence and endurance as subjects for its ten anthems of independence. All the songs but one were written by Hynde, 32, a woman who has no patience with sermons and no time for homilies. Besides the rueful and gritty Back on the Chain Gang, the album also includes a ravishing love song, 2000 Miles; a corrosive paean to suburban gentrification, My City Was Gone; a sharp bit of blue-collar feminism, Watching the Clothes; and, perhaps best of all, Thumbelina, one of the most hard-boiled lullabies ever written. Set to a kind...