Word: vulgarizations
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...total cliche--it ends sappily ever after when Reilly, the yuppie boy, realizes love can somehow outweigh money--the characters are stereotyped to the point of offending. Throughout the novel, all the Italians living in Reilly's North End neighborhood are either connected with the Mafia or are vulgar and stupid thugs, while the Boston Irish are crude drunks (including Reilly's mother!). The women are beautiful yet emotionally damaged by problematic relationships with their fathers. Even Reilly's supposed best friend and roommate cannot escape the ethnic pigeonholing, as he hails from an Orthodox Jewish family, and, therefore...
...years ago, got it right and got it wrong. The young actor, in his first starring role, sent it solid all right--sent it immortally. His performance as Stanley Kowalski, later repeated on film, provided one of our age's emblematic images, the defining portrait of mass man--shrewd, vulgar, ignorant, a rapacious threat to all that is gentle and civilized in our culture. He gave us something else too, this virtually unknown 23-year-old actor. For when the curtain came down at the Ethel Barrymore theater on Dec. 3, 1947, our standards for performance, our expectations of what...
Redford's Tom Booker is up for that as well. Not anything so vulgar as a raw sexual encounter, mind you--nothing that would interfere with our contemplation of the simple, natural life that this movie is determined to idealize. But some soulful slow dancing, some rides into the sunset--the saintly Tom, all rueful smiles and gentle wisdom, can winsomely manage that. The question is, can we manage nearly three hours in the company of so perfect a male animal, a figure from whom, in fact, everything animalistic--for that matter, anything jaggedly human--has been blanched? There comes...
...been a landscape of harassment disturbingly like that of the movie. A few weeks ago I was headed to the Kennedy School library to do reading. Lost in my own thoughts, I heard a man's voice scream, "nice ass!" The comment brought me up short. It seemed too vulgar--it was broad daylight on a main thoroughfare. (Also, being at Harvard has made me rusty. Such a thing is commonplace in New York, but Harvard men are almost outrageously tame and generally keep ribaldry to a tolerable level.) I couldn't imagine who would say such a thing...
...wrapped up in the slot machines that she forgot to visit her kids on Christmas. And of course there's Ida, an aging widow who wears her finest gown and all of her jewelry to come play cards. Twice a month, I took my place among this vulgar spectacle to try my luck at Seven Card Stud or Texas Hold'em. My first few visits were far from pretty; not just a slow bleed of cash, more like an agonizing, gushing laceration. Soon I got the hang of things, the hand signals, the lingo, and before long I was turning...