Word: thoreau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harry Thoreau (James LeGros), Julian's partner in the bank job, has been waiting at the Marilyn Motel, where the rooms all bear names of Ms. Monroe's films. Julian wants to take his money and his girl and be on his way, but there are, as Harry points out, two major problems with that plan. The first is that Lucille has taken up with Tuerto (James Belushi), a ball-scratching casino-owner and thug. The second is that "the money the weirdness is gone." And here is where the weirdness starts...
...most provocative: the argument that Bangladesh's problems must not stem from overpopulation since the city of Freemont, California, is just as crowded and yet sustains a pleasant, middle-class life- style; the idea that most Amazon Indians would rather move out of the rain forest; a description of Thoreau as a "sanctimonius beatnik." Still, O'Rourke is funny. In the Amazon he encounters one Yagua Indian with a grass skirt so elaborate that "he was lucky he hadn't been declared an endangered ecosystem from the waist down...
Jain jokingly calls this part of their lives "doing the race thing." The "Wacky phase" they went through together dictated much of what they felt able to do with their lives at the time: "what you read [Ellison, not Thoreau], who you would deign to go out with [Blacks, definitely not whites], what your interests were in politics--all with very little emphasis on action...
...follow this, we need a two-semester class that moves to the modern period--something like a diluted English 10 combined with Government 1061. Doubtless, we'd have to include Dostoevsky, Balzac, Goethe and the Americans: Jefferson. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and DuBois. Perhaps, selections from Smith and Freud...
...completed the other ten. While the conflicts of the play, both domestic and ideological are expertly crafted by O'Neill, he never achieves the necessary element of making us care. Until the last scenes, there is no movement, no reason to watch. The question of whether Lord Byron or Thoreau win in the end is not enough to sustain a drama. By the time resolution is ours, we have little interest in it beyond the academic...