Word: sharpness
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...Niuniu takes us back to when she was an innocent young girl and leads us through the pivotal moments of her life. It's not unlike watching a Formula 1 race: there are lots of sharp twists and turns but it only gets really good when somebody crashes. Luckily (at least for the reader), this story is filled with wrecks. Niuniu's father abandons the family. Her teacher sexually assaults her. A fire kills her lesbian lover. Her boyfriend leaves her. Illness takes her mother. The pain of these tragedies awakens Niuniu to the reality of life in Beijing, where...
...With a $23 million budget and cast that includes Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne, Nair's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair is her biggest film yet. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, the 1820s London social climber who set the bar by which such mountaineers would forever after be measured. The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray's Indian influences?he was born in Calcutta?including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the "outlandish" sight of Witherspoon doing...
...left documentaries for fiction because she got tired of waiting for things to happen." The role of the headstrong itinerant is not without a price, however. Time and again, Nair returns on screen to themes of displacement and immigration, the ache of exile. "The parallels between her and Becky Sharp are amazing," says Witherspoon. "She had so many experiences of being an outsider, being a foreigner in a foreign country...
...recognize Becky Sharp. Ever since William Makepeace Thackeray created her more than 150 years ago, she has been the universally recognized embodiment of the social climber, in her case trying to rise out of poverty to a respectable position in a society?Georgian England?more rigidly stratified than any we know. In that delicately poised world, speaking the wrong word, using the wrong fork, could mean disaster, and the suspense in Vanity Fair derives largely from our anxious observation of Becky navigating a vast sea of swells...
...traditional rain-soaked Indian nuptial ceremony. So at first glance, her latest undertaking, a $23 million adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, may come as something of a surprise. It's an unveiling of 19th century London through the eyes of the indomitable social climber Becky Sharp, who starts life in poverty but uses her beauty and cunning to rise in status. The film, which opens this week, is being marketed mostly on the box-office clout of its star, Reese Witherspoon. But Nair's hand creates the movie's personality: she fills the film with vibrant...