Word: terrain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plot. He relies on arbitrary action more than character development and takes too long reaching an ending. Moments might be cathartic except that these people, with the exception of the son, are not the sort to learn from their mistakes. But Povod knows his terrain, his dialogue is sharp and colorful yet fits the characters, he never bogs down in exposition, and he sentimentalizes nothing. Bill Hart's direction matches the scuffed-linoleum and religious-kitsch realism of Donald Eastman's set and ensures that low-life pathos never overwhelms the play's bawdy, feisty humor...
...logic prevailed, Fao would be awarded not to the winner but to the loser of the struggle for this wet, muddy wasteland. Heavy trucks carrying Iraqi soldiers and supplies to the front rumble over roads running along levees, above the marshy terrain approaching Fao. The Iranians, using flat-bottomed boats with powerful outboard engines, roar across the blue-green waters of the gulf to deliver ammunition and reinforcements, who bring the latest , exhortations of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...fondly recall the programs of TV's alleged Golden Age, the '50s. A more realistic nostalgia has grown up around the era's scruffy, fevered atmosphere backstage. The film My Favorite Year offered peephole glimpses of those times; now Max Wilk, a noted historian of popular art, revisits the terrain in A Tough Act to Follow. His acerbic novel blends reverie with naked rage at conniving, screen-deep program executives who have displaced the medium's pioneers. Although some secondary characters and events are real, Wilk focuses on an imaginary comedian, Jody Cassel, natural star and born victim...
Welcome to regional-theater cinema, where locale is a crucial character, the pace is measured in eye drops, and everyone on both sides of the camera aspires to the ordinary. As playwright (The Trip to Bountiful) and screenwriter (Tender Mercies), Horton Foote has backpacked over this terrain for two generations. On Valentine's Day, the prequel (though not the equal) of last year's 1918, marks one more stroll through Foote's family plot. Again we find the Vaughn and Robedaux families forcing smiles and small talk as the Great War rages 5,000 miles from their southeastern Texas town...
...place they are forgetting isn't all that different from Las Vegas, at least in certain superficial regards. Like Las Vegas, Hibbing sits out in the middle of nowhere, some 60 miles northwest of Duluth. It too is a city of straight streets and flat terrain. It has an MGM lounge (rather more subdued than its Nevada namesake) and a men's store with top hat, gloves and cane outlined in a neon sign (which is, however, seldom lit). Las Vegas may have Wayne Newton and the Golden Nugget, but Hibbing produced Bob Dylan, and it boasts that...