Word: tale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is, it should be said, a certain lack of perspective in Ted's writing. After all, it was he, not David, who sent the bombs. Still, the original tale had been so much neater: the evil, deranged brother and the righteous, heartbroken brother who put a killer out of commission. As it turns out, the Kaczynski tragedy is more Greek than American, a morally complicated tale in which even the most righteous intentions have created shadows that will haunt all the players for the rest of their lives...
...didn't force her to make stag films, as Humbert had said. The real problem, though, is in the narrative voice. In Lolita, Humbert, an educated European, could wax satyric in language as elaborate as any poet's or pedant's. Lo, 11 when the tale begins, and no scholar, must be limited in word power and storytelling skills. Yet the book's prose style, while undistinguished, is far too precocious and knowing for even the brightest kid. Lo could no more have written Lo's Diary than Harry Potter could have written the Harry Potter books...
...setting is Turow's fictional Kindle County, the by now palpable Midwestern arena of his previous best sellers and, fairly transparently, Turow's home turf of Cook County, Ill. For proper distancing, Robbie's outlandish tale is narrated with understated sympathy by his lawyer, a squeaky-clean member of the bar who is named after his distinguished ancestor, the colonial Virginian George Mason. Robbie's foil is Evon Miller, the latest iteration of one of page and screen's most popular new types: the female FBI agent...
What director Sydney Pollack, one of the movies' great romantics (Tootsie, Out of Africa), saw in this lugubrious tale is even harder to imagine. There's no heat, wit or glamour in his telling of it. The movie is like bad gossip: a scandalous premise that comes to no interesting--or even amusingly ironic--point...
...PREMISE: A tale of violence and passion in the 17th century set in iambic pentameter. But don't let that scare you away: there is enough poison, familial deception, and insanity to keep you on the edge of your seat...