Word: plotting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ, but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents, Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white visionaries who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to help fashion a free...
...Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and to claim the soul of an innocent. In both films, the local nonwhites -- yellow or black -- are less a group of dramatic characters than a plot device, a shadow...
...second barrier to political action is an unwillingness to believe that something so far outside the bounds of historical experience can, in fact, be occurring. To put it another way, this set of problems sounds like the plot of a bad science-fiction movie. People automatically assume it can't be real...
...LYRE OF ORPHEUS by Robertson Davies (Viking; $19.95). The third novel in a trilogy about the life and aftereffects of an eccentric millionaire. An engaging plot involving high finance, grand opera and a voice from Limbo...
There are no moral complexities here, no cunning passages of history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against...