Word: underworld
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...face of Russian reform has a new blemish -- a pustule, in fact. The country's third-largest city, Nizhni Novgorod, yesterday elected as its mayor Andrei Klimentyev -- a multimillionaire known in the underworld as "The Pustule.? Klimentyev has done two jail terms for fraud, and currently faces a number of other criminal charges...
Step back: Jackie Brown is fundamentally a boring movie, which has to be bought into to be enjoyed or believed. The devices that worked in the past are now really straining under the pop culture pressure and expectations: the tangled slice-of-underworld-life plots, time sequence double-takes, vintage insta-cool sound track, and all the rest are present--but sloppy and unsatisfying. Fundamentally, Tarantino has failed to make things click; the elements fizzling in a way reminiscent of the almost-but-not-quite of Mike Leigh's Career Girls...
...point is not that Tarantino really works for the music industry, but that the way in which he's selling us his interests is no longer interesting. His vividly imagined, detailed criminal underworld, with a language all its own, was what helped hold together the short-attention-span oddities of his first two endeavors. Now, shocking devices foisted upon this movie's stultifyingly paced plot and Grier's well-intentioned yet boring performance seem instantly tired. At one point, the "sudden shoot" gimmick--witness Tim Roth's character in Reservoir Dogs, or Pulp Fiction's poor victim of Vincent Vega...
...Underworld (Scribner) Despite its title, Don DeLillo's 11th and most ambitious novel is not about organized crime. DeLillo takes on nothing less ambitious than the buried life of the cold war, the specter of nuclear annihilation as experienced by a large group of vividly rendered characters. The story begins with Bobby Thomson's famous home run in 1951 and moves back and forth over the following four decades, showing how we all got here from there...
...lusty creation never seems "larger than life," a cliche that underestimates the size of life. Better to say that Barney fills an expansive and unconventional existence. He is the son of Montreal's first Jewish policeman, Izzy Panofsky, who would have been at home in the old Odessa underworld. The younger Panofsky spent the early '50s in Paris, where he debauched with expats and married a crazy poet whose suicide ensured her canonization by academic feminists. What Barney calls "the true story of my wasted life" may seem undisciplined and chronologically impaired. In fact his memoir is cunningly designed...