Word: astonishment
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There is indeed. It is a system that punishes eroticism with an X rating, yet rewards violence -- from rape to dismemberment -- with an R. Each new violent movie, like this summer's Total Recall, wants to astonish jaded audiences with its special-effects audacity. But adult sexuality, even when investigated as discreetly as it is in Henry & June, is deemed objectionable. "You can cut off a breast," says Kaufman, "but you can't caress it. The violent majority is dictating to a tender minority...
...know it's Gorbachev. Who else could it be?" How many times we have heard those words in the past few months from friends and colleagues -- even a few competitors -- trying to guess our annual secret. While the choice of the Soviet President may not astonish many readers, one aspect of the decision was a bigger secret than usual. Among ourselves, we referred to it as "the D factor." Instead of naming Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Year for 1989, we decided to designate him Man of the Decade. The only precedent for such a departure from the Y word...
Accepting defense claims that he was following orders from higher-ups, the jury convicts the retired Marine on only three of twelve charges in the Iran- contra affair. -- A TIME poll finds most Americans want a pardon for North. -- A coal strike in Virginia that would astonish John L. Lewis. -- The strange career of a top congressional aide...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer continues to astonish. The King of the Fields is his second book of 1988. (The Death of Methuselah, a collection of stories, was published in April.) And this new novel, his first in five years, radically departs from nearly all his previous fiction. This time out, the setting is not a remote Polish village, the streets and cafes of Warsaw, or the expatriate haunts of Manhattan. "The story begins -- when?" This opening sentence is the Nobel laureate's typically no-nonsense way of announcing a narrative that will unfold in an indeterminate past...
...finance his own pictures he became a successful strolling player: something of a matinee idol in Jane Eyre (1944), the wry incarnation of postwar evil in The Third Man (1949) and any number of lowing hierarchs and potentates in his nearly 30- year exile from another chance to astonish Hollywood. Now that he is dead, the industry that discarded him will nominate him for sainthood. It may also realize that in his life it has a surefire biopic: Citizen Welles. But who, now that he is dead, would play the title role? More important, who could direct...