Word: splendid
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Writer Kathy McWorter and director Jon Avnet alternate these moral mud baths with warm soaks in sentimentality. Sometimes The War is so noble you want to spank it. But as it spins fascinatingly out of control, the film is nevertheless secured by the four splendid actors who play the Simmons family. Costner, a daring actor in his narrow range, lets his voice and heart break subtly on every line. And the two kids are fine -- full of sense, discretion and what we used to call gumption...
...frequently spends his time riding the local "Dinky" train on its short hop between Princeton and Princeton Junction, reading newspapers discarded by other passengers. Some knew him as the author of the enormously complicated mathematical equations that appeared on classroom blackboards from time to time -- the product of a splendid but troubled mind working out his thoughts when no one was around...
...check and mate -- and mate and mate. The Marquise (mezzo Frederica von Stade, in top form) is an archmanipulator who wields her sensual allure like a double-edged sword, encouraging her lover's worst instincts as she wreaks her revenge on society. Her foil, the unapologetic knave Valmont (the splendid baritone Thomas Hampson), is a cynical womanizer who makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with one of his victims, unwisely and too well. Who is worse? The amoral rake who seduces and abandons without remorse? Or the wily temptress who sends her dark knight on errant missions...
Larry McMurtry's splendid horse opera Lonesome Dove was a marvel of nostalgic bosh, and that same rare gift for making heroic tales from small-town street sweepings is on view in his new novel. Pretty Boy Floyd (Simon & Schuster; 444 pages; $24), written with McMurtry's screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana, is a lesser story, loosely tethered to the life and death of the renowned badman Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-34). But like Lonesome Dove, it beguiles the reader with a golden haze of lovely lies...
Though he says he's not exactly "tanned, rested and ready" now that his summer is over, Knowles remains effusive. "It has simply been a splendid summer full of hard work and I look forward to the fall with great anticipation," he says...