Word: yarns
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Mentioned briefly in the book was a yarn, told secondhand to Friedman by a couple who attended one of his lectures in 1972. They claimed that a friend named Grady ("Barney") Barnett, now dead, had told them about coming upon a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin, N.M., about 150 miles west of the Foster ranch, in 1947. Before being shooed away by military police, he claimed, he had spotted several little bodies strewn nearby. Since the story had no apparent connection to Roswell and was given scant credence by Friedman and the authors, it was generally ignored...
...music critic, knows the angst of passing judgment on artists like his subject this week, singer Erykah Badu. So he was much relieved when his own debut novel, My Favorite War, won favorable reviews last year. "Fast, funny and furious," is how the Boston Globe described his satirical yarn of a young African-American journalist (not unlike Farley) laboring for a national publication (not unlike USA Today, his previous employer) in Washington during the Gulf War. Now HBO has optioned My Favorite War for a made-for-cable movie, a prospect that can make even a veteran critic...
Undeterred by the minor literary scandal that ensued and obviously a sucker for a rattling good (if wildly improbable) yarn, writer-director Barry Levinson proceeded with his screen adaptation of the story. In doing what a filmmaker must do--strip a book to its narrative essence--he has perhaps resolved whatever controversy may still cling to Carcaterra's work. We now see clearly that the author's primary source wasn't life but movies...
...less ambitious context this combination of inventive slackness and intellectual slipperiness would not much matter. We could simply relax and enjoy a rattling good yarn--Braveheart without the kilts, Viva Zapata! without the sombreros--by a director who is shot for shot and scene for scene a masterly craftsman. But Neil Jordan, who is of course Irish, claims this is "an examination of conscience." He is also volubly aware that the culture of violence that has haunted his country's history was embodied by Collins and his cohorts. Jordan therefore owes to the present, as well as to the past...
...suit died with the antagonists, it gave publicity to the fabrications in Pentimento and Scoundrel Time. From the former comes the story Julia, which casts Hellman as a heroic anti-Nazi in World War II. Jane Fonda played Lillian in the movie (Vanessa Redgrave was Julia). None of the yarn was true, but the author stubbornly maintained its veracity...