Word: laudanum
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John Irving's rural sprawl of a novel becomes, in his screenplay, a small epic with subtle strengths. The setting is harsh--a Maine orphanage in the early '40s, with war and sexual abuse looming--but the mood is warm and precise, as a flinty, laudanum-addicted doctor (the excellent Michael Caine) tutors his brightest charge (Tobey Maguire, the most watchful of young actors) to be his protege. Hallstrom, here as in My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, lets the characters carry the story without allowing the actors to push too hard. This...
...told, Sears sold 100,000 prefabricated models, and most of them are still standing and occupied today. Some of the items advertised in the early years seem, well, unseemly now. Before the Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the catalog listed a number of dubious medicinal aids, including laudanum, a notoriously addictive, opium-based headache remedy and sedative. Pistols and rifles were aggressively marketed for years. The big book luxuriated in excess. Who had ever thought of buying a car by mail? The 1910 catalog offered an automobile called a motor buggy -- manufactured by Sears -- for $395. Never...
...Ladies of the Club. " Now, some 50 years later, her overweight saga has been published to enormous fanfare. Only one aspect of this heartwarming tale falters: Ladies itself. Through innumerable crises, illegitimate children, laudanum addiction, lesbianism and suicide, the many heroines remain mere mouthpieces. They speak of sex as "that horrid business...
...biography accurately describes Les Fleurs du Mai as an "anatomy of addiction"-of men and women hooked on drugs, alcohol and every variation of sex. Baudelaire himself drank to the brink of alcoholism and took 150 drops a day of laudanum-twice the dose fatal to a nonaddict. Yet the drug Baudelaire was most addicted to was hope: luxe, calme et volupté-the elegance of Islamic paradise, a Christian's heavenly peace and a pagan bliss of the senses. Baudelaire chanted of this blessed trinity while he suffered the diseases of the age: poverty, rage and soul-withering...
...with an "accident." It is François's wife who was Charles' mistress. Charles sits uneasily at home, toying with his dinner, forcing himself to eat dessert and play a game of Scrabble with his wife and children. He even has to take several drops of laudanum to sleep...