Word: wasteland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...soon discover, along with the two unemployed concubines who are more or less tourguides for the show, that this is no ordinary spot. It's a sandswept, burning wasteland, oozing with mysterious "black goop." Everyone's concerned only to avoid the heat, and our luckless heroines, Alma Lovin (Brian Kenet) and Gwen Myway (David Nacht) can't even sell their experienced bodies. It's "Just deserts...In the land that God forgot/It's too darn...
...which he used before rock videos and "Miami Vice" even existed, in underrated films like Sorcerer and Cruising. The "look" in To Live and die in L.A., achieved in collaboration with cinematographer Robby Muller (Paris, Texas) and production designer Lilly Kilvert, is splashy and steamy, a meld of industrial wasteland and high-tech decor with a cumulative presence stronger than the characters and story. It is more powerful and yet more subtle than "Miami Vice" where loud musical scores drown out even gunshots...
...longest yet, and like so many of those before it, contains perfunctory characterization, arid prose and an authentic gift for conveying the mighty sweep of history. This time the locus is the Lone Star State. Michener begins his tale in the early 16th century, when Tejas was unexplored Mexican wasteland. In the kilopage fictification that follows, events and personalities pass in review: the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto, Comanche raids, cattle drives, oil, religion, high school football, superpatriotism and real estate dodges. Much of this is fascinating, but it is propelled by a strange device: Michener imagines...
...government was wrapped between its dreams of seeing the tricouleur across half of Africa and the stark realization that the Sahara was a wasteland universally considered worthless. As a result, it allocated men and money only in drips and sports. Its hesitation meant the conquests of the Sahara was not one great adventure, but a series of expeditions of varying brutality and success that established a string of forts through the middle of the desert...
...Persse find Angelica, thereby bringing fertile rain to the critical wasteland? Not before Lodge pulls out all the old tricks: hidden births and revealing birthmarks, magical instances of love at first sight and many, many journeys. The author's wry and graceful style keeps a complicated plot briskly in motion and surprisingly fresh. Along the way, he takes some gentle but funny swipes at reigning scholarly ideologies and provides enough surface diversions to beguile readers who have never heard of Sir Thomas Malory or the Modern Language Association. The author even helps neophytes along with a definition given...