Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is something different about an Oscar-worthy movie. It is larger than life, it has grand themes on love and life, it is supposed to inspire, thrill, move. In short, it is Dances With Wolves grand, it is Saving Private Ryan intense, it is The English Patient complex. Director Norman Jewison's (Moonstruck, Agnes of God) latest offering, The Hurricane, aspires to be an Oscar movie. It is lush, it is serious and boy does it try to stuff itself full with Oscar-worthy themes...
...director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...
...white writer in apartheid South Africa, she stood staunchly with what she always calls the "liberation movement." Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty...
...script is subtle and complex, and this production takes full advantage of its depth. Nor is it one-sided: as we learn from a ten-year correspondence (often wonderfully interactive on stage) between Karen and Bibi, Karen feels stifled by the oppressive Chinese regime that imposes the role of a "good citizen" on its people at the expense of the individual. Karen feels like "a beautiful bird in a cage" whose colors will never be seen nor its song heard. Reading about America and the freedom allowed in the West in books sent by Bibi only makes Karen more depressed...
...needed, Washington played a major role in influencing the decision to take no action," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "Having just come out of the Somalia debacle, which had been badly managed by both the U.S. and the U.N., Washington didn't want to get involved in another complex conflict in Africa." Of course, while the solutions were complex, the numbers were devastatingly simple: 800,000 people were killed in one month in Rwanda as Hutu mobs butchered their Tutsi neighbors...