Word: half-mad
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...turn, find ourselves in a theater of cruelty, consoling ourselves with incidental pleasures: the anti-comedic darkness of Dunne's lighting and sensibility; the relentless, half-mad meanness of Ryan's performance; the snarling strength Karyo demonstrates in multiple adversity. These people don't give a hoot if they warm our hearts or lift our spirits, and that's not nothing in a time when mainstream movie comedy is all blandness and ingratiation. Too bad we can't reward their bravery with the sound of more than one hand clapping...
...target being poor Anton. We, in turn, find ourselves in a theater of cruelty, which is about the last place we expected to be if we believed the ads and the trailer, consoling ourselves with incidental pleasures: the anti-comedic darkness of Dunne?s lighting and sensibility; the relentless, half-mad meanness of Ryan?s performance; the snarling strength Karyo demonstrates in multiple adversity. Too bad we can?t reward their bravery with the sound of more than one hand clapping...
Keller's story is the most harrowing. The book, narrated in the alternating voices of a Korean comfort woman named Akiko and her Korean-American daughter Beccah, delivers a wrenching view of war and its lasting intergenerational impact. Akiko, driven half-mad by the war, is haunted by the ghost of a woman from the camp and becomes a sought-after mystic after moving to America. But to call this a ghost story is to miss the point: Comfort Woman is really about pain, the kind that haunts and is handed down, like old, sad clothes. Writes Akiko: "I knew...
...thirties, is released back into the small Southern town he left twenty-five years before. That, you see, was the day he found Mama in bed with a neighbor and did a little number on them with the weapon of the title. Karl, though, is more half-baked than he is half-mad, the kind of convicted murderer who Didn't Know Any Better, and who helps little 12-year-old boys named Frank carry home heavy bags of laundry...
...Devil Knows You're Dead (Morrow; 316 pages), Scudder lurks about trying to clear a half-mad homeless man of a murder charge. Why would this fellow have shot a well-dressed yuppie in a phone booth? Then, just when Scudder has discovered that the natty corpse had a lot of enemies, the homeless man is stabbed to death in prison. What's happening? The murk deepens enough to involve moral ambiguities for Scudder before he works out the answers...