Word: venalities
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Hemingway was wrong. The very rich are not different from you and me. They can be just as foolish and venal as the rest of us. Over the years it has been difficult to pity Ann Woodward. Certainly Truman Capote and Dominick Dunne were merciless in their barely disguised fictional portraits of social climbing metastasized into murder. But in Susan Braudy's lackluster account, readers are permitted at least an occasional twinge of compassion as they watch a gawky girl from the Kansas plains emerge from the chrysalis of gritty rural poverty into Manhattan on the eve of World...
...long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king." What are the rules of Stone's game? Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer? Propagandist? Documentary filmmaker? Historian? Journalist? Fantasist? Sensationalist? Paranoid conspiracy-monger? Lone hero crusading for the truth against a venal Establishment? Answer: some of the above...
...Angeles hiring migrant workers to wait in line for them to buy watches shaped like cucumbers or bacon and eggs. On Hollywood Boulevard I saw a HISTORIC LANDMARK sign outside the site of "The First Custom T-Shirt Shop in California," flyers on the wall promoting a group called Venal Opulence and, in a store across the street, "Confucius X-Rated Mini-Condom Fortune Cookies." No wonder, I thought, that when I tell people I live in California -- worse, that I choose to live in California -- they look at me as if I had decided not to get serious...
Often faced with the choice of appearing either venal or stupid, Clifford and Altman skillfully parried most questions. Clifford justified his large stock profits by explaining that he had taken only a nominal salary of $50,000 a year, and that the stock gains were a result of his successful efforts to boost the value of the company. Asked how they could possibly have been unaware that they were involved with a criminal enterprise, the two pointed out that B.C.C.I. had also managed to fool the Bank of England, Price Waterhouse and the Bank of America. But their polished responses...
...theme. It eliminates the middleman, Death, by subjecting Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) to a gunshot wound that erases his memory. Bang!, you're a new man. The old one needed some revision. That Henry was a slick Manhattan lawyer who misused his gifts to ruin innocent men and save venal corporations. Instructed by his chic wife (Annette Bening) to apologize to their 11-year-old daughter (Mikki Allen), Henry instead scolds the dear girl in Latin. The guy barely deserves to live, until he gets a chance to do it right, from scratch...