Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PRODUCERS MICHAEL RACHMIL and Daniel Melnick probably thought that Quicksilver, Footloose's Kevin Bacon's new star vehicle, would do for bicycle riding what Rocky did for boxing and Chariots of Fire did for track and field. No such luck. This aspiring urban tale of a oncehip and in-control commodities trader who becomes a bicycle messenger offers the viewer little more than a confused story line...
Instead we have the rather straight-forward tale of Molly McGrath (Goldie Hawn), divorcee and mother, who aspires to coach football in memory of her great father, The Football Coach. Of course, the only position available to her is at the nastiest school in a Chicago slum where armed guards patrol the hallways and the principal strolls with two dobermen pinchers at his side...
...palace and the several hundred trade-union volunteers who built it, the resemblance to a gothic cathedral is not merely stylistic. For weeks, through a mortifying, mercurial Minnesota winter, two 80-man shifts have worked six days a week to finish what is, after all, a kind of fairy-tale church. The picturesque asymmetry, however, saves the palace from seeming grave. "Ours was not a modernist solution," said Karl Ermanis, the palace's chief architect, as if there were any doubts. The designers borrowed from King Ludwig II, Piranesi, Gaudi, Maxfield Parrish and Walt Disney. There are some fetching small...
...Handmaid's Tale will be taken in some quarters as a feminist parable or rallying cry. What is Offred, after all, if not an embodiment of woman subjugated to the power of men? In truth, Atwood's vision is considerably more complex than that. For the Republic of Gilead has come about, in part, with the help of women. Offred's memories of childhood include the time that her mother, an ardent feminist, took her to a ceremonial burning of pornographic magazines...
...cautionary tale, Atwood's novel lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. It warns against too much: heedless sex, excessive morality, chemical and nuclear pollution. All of these may be worthwhile targets, but such a future seems more complicated than dramatic. But Offred's narrative is fascinating in a way that transcends tense and time: the record of an observant soul struggling against a harsh, mysterious world...