Word: torments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. QUENTIN CRISP, 90, witty, flamboyantly effeminate author of The Naked Civil Servant; in Manchester, England. In his autobiography, famous for its lack of self-pity, the self-described "mother superior of homosexuality" chronicled youthful torment at the hands of homophobes (see Eulogy...
...savors a sweet, unexpected stardom. Says he: "I've been able to fix up my house a little." Ferrer is 72, and his voice lacks the strength it once had, but its power is undiminished. "I don't want the flowers to know of my life's torment," he sings in Spanish on Silencio. "If they knew of my suffering they would cry." That crack you hear in his voice? It's real...
...level, kind of like the Samaritan who lies down on the oil slick so you can walk on him to get over the puddle. With each new movie, he ups the ante, symbolically slathering more mustard on the dog so that it becomes more about how much torment he can take rather than about the movie itself. The evolution of this Method throughout his career shoves subtlety where it don't shine. Mad Max meets Martin Riggs meets Braveheart equals Porter, the con man with a heart of Maria Bello. Yet, beneath all this viscerality lies a humor quotient liberally...
...raked angles and presented in quick cuts by director Tony Scott--is required of Dean to get his life back and his tormentors chastened. You can probably imagine, as well, the gleam, sheen and extensiveness of the high-tech machinery that a well-endowed bureaucracy can deploy to torment a citizen on which its baleful eye has fallen. You may even be able to predict the chipper amorality of the techies manning the keyboards and terminals. What do they care about ends when the means to it are so much fun to play with...
...civilizing nicety in this most civilized of narrations is that the two are passable amateur musicians. Maturin plays the cello, and as Aubrey admits, "I scrape a little, sir. I torment a fiddle from time to time." As chapters end--chapters of blood, crashing seas and weevily sea biscuit--the two are likely to take solace together, tormenting Locatelli or Boccherini. Friendship, lifelong and ramified, between these two and with recurring minor characters, is the bedrock theme of the novels...