Word: unhousebroken
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...sharp idea: to explore the polar-opposite rules of guy comedies and gal comedies. Guy comedy revels in the blithe display of unruly behavior; a Rogen or Jason Segel character doesn't do or say crude things for shock's sake but as an expression of his unhousebroken personality. It's not what he does; it's what he is. Gal comedy plays on these same embarrassing words or situations to test the heroine's decorum and destroy her dignity. In both kinds of movies, the activities and attitudes that men are proud or unaware of are exactly the ones...
...Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel...
...subjects of biographies, Parker would be considerably less interesting if she had led a happier life. The woman who had everything -- appeal, style, brains, celebrity and that deadly wit -- also drank to excess for decades, repeatedly attempted suicide, spent her declining years in the noisome atmosphere generated by adamantly unhousebroken dogs, and was cremated in a party dress Gloria Vanderbilt had given her as an act of charity. Leslie Frewin's The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker revisits this pith and pathos more grandiloquently but less methodically than John Keats' 1970 volume You Might As Well Live, on which Frewin substantially...
...marriage dissolves. Marge must work the gambling wheel at the Elks' club to raise her son Kurt and to keep the fallow farm where her widowed mother bitterly awaits death. Part II is Kurt's account of Mother Marge's struggles, her drinking and her unhousebroken boyfriends, including a Sioux sheep rancher. The novel concludes with a hint of contrivance as the title, Leaving the Land, takes on a resonant double meaning: the inevitability of departures and the promise of continuity...
...part ethnic memory, part ethnic lament. It evokes Irish customs and political power in the Brooklyn of 1890. In a fiery monologue, Matt Stanton (Steven Ryan), a ward boss, describes his immigrant passage across the Atlantic in midwinter. The men and women in the fetid, icy hold were like unhousebroken animals...