Word: twists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Twenty years and 15 novels later, Muriel Spark is as tricky as ever. At first appearance,her cool, elegant prose and witty characters seem comfortable within the traditional British comedy of manners. But with a twist of plot here and a turn of the psychological screw there, Spark sends her comedies careening off in deadlier directions. Wit becomes malice. Tea and crumpets mask terror and corruption. Ordinary lives turn bizarre and mysterious...
...script offers a number of scenes that suggest an air of gathering menace, but it never quite manages to stitch them together into a tense line of force. Nor does it offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect-an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable line of dialogue somewhere else. This is a disappointment: Demme's last film, Handle With Care, abounded in all these qualities, even though it was complexly comic social commentary rather than a simple suspense story...
...stage was set. This was to be a showdown of rival Harvard and Yale, the likes of which had never before been seen. The one new twist to the story, though, was that Yale had been given the inside track. Harvard went in an underdog, seeded second behind Yale in every race but the J.V. lightweight contest (where Yale had a very weak boat...
...VEHICLE IN The Chain of Chance is a variation upon the conventional detective novel--one might call it a murder without a murderer--which he infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
Opponents of the death penalty insist that the new laws still work unfairly. The argument on the effect of race has taken a new twist: killing a white is more likely to bring the death penalty than killing a black. In Alabama, for instance, on the basis of 1,395 murders and 41 death sentences, it is twelve times more likely. Even though roughly equal numbers of blacks and whites were killed in Georgia, Texas and Florida from 1973 to 1977, 90% of the convicts on death row got there by killing whites, according to a study by Sociologists William...