Word: sordidness
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...control of 11 hotel-casinos on the Strip and more than half the gambling action. Last year Kerkorian sold his stake in the MGM movie studio for $5 billion to a consortium led by Sony. In fact, Kerkorian's dalliance with MGM over the years reads like a sordid back-lot love story. He first bought shares in the studio in 1969, sold MGM/UA to Ted Turner in '86, bought back most of it a few months later, unloaded it to an Italian financier in '90 and bought it again in '96. Whoever got stiffed along...
...thirsts for oil and there is not enough in other countries to sustain worldwide demand. So, oil companies have no choice but to deal with these regimes. It would be hard to establish a code of ethical investment for all oil companies. After all, if some regime is too sordid or controversial for a publicly listed U.S. oil company, there are plenty of other national oil companies in countries that do not care much for human rights and are willing to make a quick buck without competition. Boycotts and divestment are meaningless unless there are harsh penalties for not complying...
...relative of Joely's, but she handsomely fills her star-is-born role as Ruth Ellis, the London nightclub hostess who in 1955 murdered her boyfriend and became the last woman executed in Britain. Coiffed and coutured in the Marilyn Monroe fashion, Richardson shrieks her way through Ruth's sordid life with coloratura bravura. "I love you," murmurs David Blakely (Rupert Everett), a spoiled, sodden rich boy with a passion for racing cars and a taste for tarts. "Everybody does," Ruth shrugs. "Why should you be different?" An older man, Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm), is Ruth's pal and protector...
...mythmaking. They rearrange experience to endow it with drama and significance. The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's point of view. In Gardner's telling, a blind harper appears at King Hrothgar's hall and sings, transforming Hrothgar's bloody, sordid career into "ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies. The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they who knew the truth, remembered...
...latch onto this story not just because it's a riveting end to a high-stakes manhunt. We find ourselves transfixed and uplifted by the sordid ordinariness of it all. He was an alleged rapist and murderer. She was tied up in a bathtub, clinging to the wreckage of a life that was barely afloat. One was a monster, the other a woman unable to care for her 5-year-old, looking for cigarettes in the dark. And out of that came something, well, beautiful. He saw his purpose: to serve God in prison, to turn his life around, even...