Word: jagged
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...skill as writer and director to use cold-blooded murder (three times) as the topper for gag sequences. Once or twice his former sweet hipness glimmers through, and he has written a funny bit for his pal Arsenio Hall, playing a man on a murderous crying jag. But mostly Harlem Nights offers a depressing answer to that not entirely pressing question, "Will success spoil Eddie Murphy?" It looks...
Castro's second build-up campaign is aimed at the Cuban physique. At 60, the Cuban leader is on a health jag, exhorting his people to exercise regularly, participate in sports and shed unnecessary weight. Two years ago, to establish his credibility in an antismoking campaign, Castro gave up his trademark cigars. But the results of the health campaign have been mixed. Officials claim that tobacco consumption dropped 23% in the campaign's first year, but not all Cubans have become converts to clean living. On the compulsory Saturday workday, a foursome of male goldbrickers sharing a bottle of bootleg...
...story hotel tucked inside. It is the architectural equivalent of the boat in the bottle, but the trick satisfies. The owners might have built a high- rise; fortunately, they deferred to the steel ceiling and let the architects, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, spread the new buildings out. Planes and walls jag fetchingly, as in real cities. Rounding a corner or descending a stair, / there are architectural surprises. Store names may be as treacly as the stuff they sell (Deck the Walls, Let's Make a Daiquiri and I Can't Believe It's Yogurt), but steel stairway railings and iron treads...
...unsuccessful. True, he has a few scruples. He does not mainline heroin, he walks out before the end of an apparently genuine snuff film, and he refuses an obliging friend's invitation to rape a drugged and trussed up twelve-year- old girl. He is also sensitive. The crying jag he experiences at his psychiatrist's office may suggest some inner anguish, although it might just as easily occur because he spends so much time drugged to the eyeballs...
...flaws. Most of the story is told by Jezebel, but it is unclear how old she is. Sometimes she makes remarks only the dowdily middle-aged should try to get away with, while at other, moments she demonstrates the lack of perspective characteristic of an adolescent on a hormonal jag. Nonetheless, this flaw does not severely impede the novel, which becomes a wild string of events culminating in a furiously paced race through Mexico as Jem and Jezebel flee home and family for the jungle estate where Jem's mother was born...