Word: turnings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...proceeds predictably - even including their breakup (he has, as you might expect, a commitment issue). She leaves him. He mourns perhaps excessively. She, astonishingly, returns to him some years later. And here both the Roth novel and Isabel Coixet's film (written by Nicholas Meyer) take a truly memorable turn. For she is gravely ill and living alone with the possibility of premature death. She wants Kepesh to take erotic photographs of her before the surgeon's knife destroys her beauty. Does she want more from him? If so, can he respond to her need...
...course, a fine actor, but in this instance there seems to me something smug, held back, in his work. Roth's Kepesh, at least for a time, has more spritzing fun with his minor celebrity life than Kingsley's does. The latter seems insufficiently surprised and confused by the turn his life takes. And Coixet has a tendency to linger on some of her scenes, giving them an unnecessary, darkly portentous quality. Some of this story's effectiveness derives from the fact that even severely threatened life often goes waywardly forward, immune to portent. There's also a non-Rothian...
...property of the Vermont house is a large rock, the subject of family lore: in the '70s, Solzhenitsyn sat his sons astride the rock and told them that someday it would turn into a flying horse and take them back to Russia. It was the sort of fairy tale you might expect a writer to tell his kids, but this one came true...
...Warren were content to be merely the most influential religious figure on the American political scene, that would be significant enough. He isn't. Five years ago, he concocted what he calls the PEACE plan, a bid to turn every single Christian church on earth into a provider of local health care, literacy and economic development, leadership training and spiritual growth. The enterprise has collected testimonials from Bono, the First Couple, Hillary Clinton, Obama, McCain and Graham, who called it "the greatest, most comprehensive and most biblical vision for world missions I've ever heard or read about." The only...
...Ultimately, the truth may turn out to be much simpler, or perhaps even more convoluted than the most convoluted conspiracy theory. With Syria, you can never tell...