Word: shocks
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These are creatures of the extremes; Norton the actor likes to walk on that serrated edge. So the shock of Keeping the Faith is that it isn't at all shocking. Its three attractive characters are, basically, celibate. Like the way-better Broadcast News, this is a film about friends obsessed with their work. Father Brian and Rabbi Jake amuse their congregations with hip jokes (it's how Sam Kinison and Jackie Mason got started), while Anna toils as a corporate fixer: "I talked McDonald's out of the McOyster...
...asked to talk about the bloody imagery in my work," says Denise Nicholas at the start of the performance, playing a famous writer returning to give a lecture at her alma mater. "Bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus." But those audience members looking for a shocking array of violence and defacement, a visual testament to the horrors of American racism which the play so brilliantly confronts, will have to look elsewhere. Yes, there is violence in The Ohio State Murders: gunshots which break across the dialogue, descriptions of a kidnapping, images of infanticide. But the shock...
...violence of The Ohio State Murders lies in this world of absence. The violence of sexual exploitation, kidnapping and murder are all forms of horror easily understood and condemned, even if they are impossible to describe in terms that do justice to the pain they can create. Gunshots can shock us for a moment, images of murdered babies can make us cringe or weep. But they are sounds and sights to which we know how to react; we have categories of thought and emotion into which we can place our surprise or anger. We can hear and appreciate the rage...
...quite reductive to label his language as pure Americana. It is American in that it is stripped-down, bare of many Old World pretensions, but Simple Stories departs from our modern literary tradition in its lack of sensationalism, redeeming, that Schulze's unadorned language is unadulterated by derogatory shock filler...
...sorry to shock you, but you're not exempt. No one is invincible," she added. "It doesn't matter what their SAT scores are or what they want to be when they grow...