Word: tales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pamela Berger's novel, and the screenplay which she co-wrote with first-time director Suzanne Schiffman, is primarily the tale of women--women as healers, as mothers, as workers, as the backbone of their community. These women, the lifegivers, are contrasted with the rigid authority of the Church. They represent the naturalistic opposite of "civilization" and they challenge the monk's--and the viewer's--nations of what constitutes knowledge, progress, society...
...compelling microcosm of village life Schiffman so skillfully brings to the screen. From the clothes of the peasants and the noblemen to the scenes of women at work in the fields, the movie succeeds in a realistic reproduction of the time, seen through the lens of the mythical tale which the film chronicles...
Evelyn Waugh was not in the best of spirits when he wrote A Handful of Dust. He poured his grief at the dissolution of his first marriage into this tale of how dimly amoral Brenda Last cuckolded her dimly moral husband Tony. Waugh managed to cast a cold, wickedly glittering eye on these foolish innocents, and to write about them with bitter, controlled irony. Both suppressing and drawing upon fury and bathos, he produced a masterpiece...
...illusion of the giant rat of Sumatra appeared in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., last November. In the telling of the tale, the rat took the form of six white men, one wearing a badge, who carried Tawana Brawley into the dark woods and held her for four days and raped her and chopped her hair and wrote KKK and NIGGER on her body and smeared dog feces on her and left her in a plastic garbage bag just behind the apartment where her family had lived until two weeks earlier...
...luxuriated in the outrage of it. The saga was extravagantly awful. Brawley is black and at the time of her disappearance was 15 years old. The old story: strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, the night riders in sheets come North now. Was hers not the primal American tale of violated black innocence, of white bigotry that wears a badge and goes unpunished? Did it not reverberate with all the horrors of America's original sin? Did it not recapitulate, precisely, the original drama of abduction and violation that brought black Africans to America in the first place? Seized...