Word: yarn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Plaza, is the weakest entry. It occasionally says something mildly amusing about the overprivileged children of New York & City's rich and famous. But Coppola and his co-writer, who happens to be his 17-year-old daughter Sofia, cannot settle on a tone for their overplotted yarn of a Junior Ms. Fixit, working simultaneously on the cases of a poor little rich boy and her parents' wavering marriage. The Coppola team tries satire and sentiment, but the story is not so much concluded as abandoned in a muddled rush. Give it a 5.5, and be grateful...
...mostly country people, along with some layabout Houstoners ("We drank margaritas as often as we could stand it"), are portrayed with rare tenderness; Bass is even tolerant of his blackhearted men. The title story is the most ambitious, a frightening descent into deep Southern swamps. But a dippy little yarn called Mississippi is just as satisfying. It is about a man who loses his girl because . . . well, because, like a horse with a straw hat on, he kept pausing to take in the foliage...
...bitter controversy in its wake. It has already won National Board of Review citations for best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman) and best supporting actress (Frances McDormand) -- prizes the film may duplicate on Academy Award night. For Mississippi Burning is made to Oscar's order: a white-heat yarn that illuminates, with fiery rhetoric at a lightning pace, one crucial chapter in American history...
Bull Durham is a dandy summer baseball yarn starring Kevin Costner. -- Red Heat is Arnold Schwarzenegger' s neat new pecs-' n'- sex epic...
...DEATH OF METHUSELAH AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $17.95). At 83, the Yiddish yarn spinner shows undiminished power to capture the peculiar din of human commerce...