Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style, attempting to get as far from civilization as possible. Backpacking and exploring rustic roads by trailer have become so popular (see box page 61) that the national parks are clogged. The Interior Department has begun an experimental computerized reservation service so that people will be assured of a plot on which to lay their sleeping bags...
...life of Los Angeles with tart asides on stylish psychiatrists discussing the notion of "sport screwing," teen-age swingers, and hip health-food restaurants where satanic waiters recite the menu like an incantation. Yet he can be tender, too, and his characters are never merely clowns or pawns of plot. With a deft and cunning irony, he can point out the essential selfishness of Blume's anguish without ever playing down to it. Occasionally, though, Mazursky loses perspective, and his characters become unintentionally funny. This happens when Nina addresses her unborn child...
...Stephen Sondheim (the Broadway composer who is himself a famous game player) and Anthony Perkins (the estimable actor) have outsmarted themselves in crafting their script. Their plot is so fiendishly difficult that their characters spend most of the time bogged down in endless expository scenes...
...LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE owes more than a passing debt to Shirley Jackson's fine novel The Haunting of Hill House, and to the clammy film Robert Wise adapted from it in 1963. Both the plot and shocks here are similar, if not so forceful: a small, antagonistic group of researchers shut themselves up in an ominous old house to divine its dark secrets. The house preys on the various psychological weaknesses of the investigators, enlarging their hidden personal frailties into flaws that are often fatal...
lunuma's own father betrays the conspirators to the police, but because of the nationalistic sympathies the plot has aroused, the son is eventually released. Then, with his zealotry intact, lunuma proceeds alone to his assassination target as planned, and commits the suicide he had desired-in the book's last sentence, which is touched by Mi-shima's lucid, kinetic imagery. "The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids...