Word: tragic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...adventure all start from the proposition "what if..."/ and ask that you leave the real world at the ticket booth. Arthur Penn has had trouble dealing with America's failure to face facts. His early films exalt the gangster, the loner who lives above and beyond society despite the tragic consequences. Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, show compassion and humor while revealing the ugliness of American mythology. Yet 1976's Missourt Breaks shows confusion, and worse, a lack of anything...
...days ago, the administration announced a $55 million increase in military aid to that country's ruling junta. The worst thing of it, of course, is that people and dying for during to ask not to live in hell. But for Americans there is, or should be, another tragic sadness. Some--with more faith than reason--thought Vietnam had taught us a little about our nation and the world. That may be we had changed...
...bathroom for customers. He then led the ex-con outside to show him where he could discreetly relieve himself. Yet Abbott's 24 years in violence-steeped prisons and reform schools, Fisher argued, had caused him to mistake Adan's ordinary gestures for provocation. It was a "tragic misunderstanding," Abbott claimed in court, that made him lash out. The jury, which deliberated for two days, rejected a graver guilty verdict of second-degree murder, which assumes an unmitigated intent to kill...
...murder would be the exception in a life that otherwise displayed merit and extravagantly claimed mercy. But Jack Abbott's vividly ranting book, brutal and brutalized, should have made the jury wonder which was more characteristic of the man: literature or murder. In a long and essentially tragic perspective (in which all consequences are endured, all debts paid), literature performs its redemptions. Mailer's formula is a shallow little mechanism. "Culture is worth a little risk," he says. The world of that sentence is upside down: you defend culture, do you not, by locking up the people...
...courtroom tension exploded a few minutes later. Under questioning by Fisher, Abbott testified that he had thought Adan was about to attack him with a knife. "It was a tragic misunderstanding," said Abbott, covering his eyes with a hand. From a front row of seats, Henry Howard, Adan's father-in-law, shouted: "You intended it, you scum! You scum, you useless piece of s---. You and Mailer and all the [other] creeps." The standing-room-only audience burst into applause, and court officials hustled Howard out of the courtroom. Fisher asked Judge Irving Lang to declare a mistrial...