Word: shocks
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...film also shows the seemingly honest Lee as a surprise partaker in police corruption, but since most of the film's other police officers are seen to be honest, if rather dull, fellows, this plot strand doesn't elicit much shock or insight, either. But the silliest aspect of the film is the relationship that develops between Hartnett's Bucky and an heiress named Madeleine Linscott (Hillary Swank). They meet in a lesbian bar (more L.A. decadence for you), but she turns out to be resolutely heterosexual, very rich and-need we say it?-that most conventional of film noir...
...would be inclined to laugh, if one were not so numbed. This movie, which was written by Josh Friedman, is less a response to a novel than it is a synopsis of it-ploddingly plotted, enlivened by the occasional shock occurrence, lacking that attention to mood and nuance which made Curtis Hanson's version of another Ellroy novel, L.A. Confidential, such a rich, rewarding entertainment a few years ago. You begin to wonder: maybe it's time to give film noir a rest. The academics have had their fun with it; no genre has attracted more scholarly attention in recent...
...didn't hear the throaty laugh first, you'd pick up on the shock of white hair at the corner table when Austin was in high politics season. Richards, then nearly 50 after years of teaching school and raising a family of four, had carved her way into Texas politics via a seat on the Travis County Commission, not a high station but a strategically placed one in the capital city. Her political roots lay with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party; she had supported the campaigns of U.S. Senator Ralph Yarbrough and Sarah Weddington, the Austin lawyer...
...many ways, Richards embodied both the old and the new Texas. She had changed the state, but the political ground had also shifted under her as conservative Democrats fled to the fast-growing Republican Party. Her defeat was a shock to the national media. After all, she was a Texan loved beyond the Red River (though to some back home, her accent always seemed suspiciously thicker on Larry King). Most of the men around the Quorum Club table are gone, and now she is too. But the image of her there remains, as a wily woman who played the game...
...Iran is the fourth-largest supplier in an already tight world market, and its threat to respond to any attack by closing the Straits of Hormuz - the maritime bottleneck through which oil from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States must pass - could send oil markets into shock. But oil futures fell to just under $64 a barrel this week, from close to $77 a month ago, suggesting that oil markets are not expecting a confrontation with Iran any time soon...