Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Thomas McGuane has lost his way since the days of The Bushwhacked Piano and does not find it in his new novel, whose aimlessness raises thoughts of old ranch buildings fallen to ruin. His hero, Joe Starling, is a brilliant painter who no longer paints (hello there, Papa H.). Becalmed, then stirred by the faintest of internal winds, he returns from the staleness of the East Coast to Montana, where he has inherited a cattle spread. Here the author novelizes industriously, with small effect. Events occur; characters are brought to life, then enter, speak and exit; but Joe remains...
...there one brilliant, compact image that captures the era of Gorbachev and the greenhouse effect, of global communications and AIDS, of mass famine and corporate imperialisms, of space exploration and the world's seas awash in plastic? The Age of Leisure and the Age of the Refugee coexist with the Age of Clones and the Age of the Deal. Time is fractured in the contemporaneous. We inhabit not one age but many ages simultaneously, from the Bronze to the Space. Did the Ayatullah Khomeini live in the same millennium as, say, Los Angeles...
...life-style on John Kennedy's Camelot, Marcos and his wife enthralled most Filipinos when he initially took office. He also set about fulfilling his campaign promises of reforms in industry and education. But by his second term, in January 1970, the tide had begun to turn against the brilliant young President. Protesting the country's economic inequities, militant anti-American students pelted the Marcoses with rocks and bottles, forcing the couple to bolt themselves inside Malacanang Palace for their own security...
...beautiful day for a wedding -- crisp, clear and, for China in midsummer, relatively cool. The latest typhoon's high winds have swept away the air pollution, and under a brilliant blue sky the guests are chatting in the hollow of a terraced field beside a single spindly tree -- symbolic decoration in a country whose scant arable land continues to disappear. Arranged neatly alongside the makeshift altar, the gifts intended for the bride's parents include a new refrigerator, a 24-in. color television set and a jet black Yamaha motorcycle. The presents are ogled, but atop the TV a photograph...
Technically, Palcy is most impressive during the hazy, back-lit courtroom scene midway through the film. Moving effortlessly from angle to angle she builds a brilliant encounter between Brando and Jurgen Prochnow, who plays Captain Stolz of the secret police. Palcy delivers a particularly effective shot of Brando after the judge announces his verdict. While commotion breaks out around the defeated lawyer, he sits immobile, quietly mumbling "fuck" over and over again...