Word: storybooks
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...first you're seduced by the sweeping ocean views, cute Victorian houses, picturesque tangerine bridges and storybook bed-and-breakfasts. But on closer inspection, the sheer volume of scented candles, glass-blown swans and seashell ashtrays sends the mind reeling. Banners that boast I LEFT MY HEART should rightly read MY WALLET, since San Francisco's real raison d'etre is separating tourists from their money. This too-too-precious chilly, hilly city is determined to stupefy you with caramel corn, sourdough bread, chocolate cable cars and painting-by-numbers that goes by the name of sidewalk...
...videos are leisurely paced and look comparatively low-tech. Visually, they are little more than still pictures strung together in a technique known, rather generously, as dissolve animation. Sales have been moderate (cost: $9.95 or $14.95 a tape), but titles are multiplying rapidly. Following its initial series of 18 storybook classics (Thumbelina, read by Kelly McGillis; The Emperor's New Clothes, with John Gielgud), the company has just launched a new collection of folktales from around the world, featuring stars like Denzel Washington and Max von Sydow. Also in the works: legendary American tales and Bible stories. The videos...
...Mother's Castle, adapted from Pagnol's memoirs. These films mope not; neither do they scold. Instead, audaciously, they take a vacation from fatalism and solemnity, locating radiance in the bosom of an ordinary bourgeois family. They say that life can be beguiling, beautiful -- at least in the storybook clarity of Pagnol...
Almost every page of the old wife's tale is lit up with the everyday magic of a world in which birds can sound like women crying and sweaters are knit in the memory of spider webs. Yet all the storybook marvels are grounded in a survivor's vinegar wit ("In Nanking, snow is like a high-level official -- doesn't come too often, doesn't stay too long"). And in front of the watercolor backdrops are horrors pitiless enough to mount a powerful indictment against a world in which women were taught that love means always having...
Though her life in a New York City ghetto was an ugly parody of that storybook vision, a certain 12-year-old girl last week clung fiercely to the ritual. After giving birth in the early hours of the morning in her bedroom, after cradling the 6-lb. 10-oz. boy until dawn, after carrying him into the hallway, stuffing him inside a plastic bag and throwing him down a garbage chute, the little girl did the only thing that made sense in her life. She went to school...