Word: plotting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ostensible plot is ripped right out of the J-horror handbook: a young married couple travel to an isolated woodland retreat to deal with the grief following their toddler son’s death. In the film’s highly-stylized prologue, the black and white, slow-motion sequence of Dafoe and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, making intense and explicit love is intercut with their son wandering into the room, witnessing their coitus, climbing out an open window, and falling. The image of the child falling in the snow-filled sky to the sound...
...Blood’s a Rover” is at least in part homage to pulp literature—a genre whose mandate is one of instant gratification. But at 640 pages, Ellroy’s latest dwells too often and for too long on aspects of the plot that, for their sheer monotony, never seem important. The truth behind the robbery and Joan Klein’s identity are both revealed so slowly that the value of surprise is squandered. None of the three protagonists are ever completely invested in the novel’s seeming climax, rendering much...
...Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the election of President Nixon, the presence and fear of communism, and the eventual death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover from a more cynical perspective than the history books. His account of the era orients the readers in the plot and leaves them with a true sense of the anger, both righteous and profane, that highlighted the period. Ellroy’s distinctive style—the brief, spare syntax reminiscent of hardboiled detective fiction—sets a dark tone for the novel and lends itself to this retelling...
Unlike their first foray into vengeance killings, however, Connor and Murphy enjoy the luxury of local celebrity in “All Saints Day,” allowing them to pick off their targets with unusual ease. As a result, the plot manages to coast along with nary a conflict. En route to the states, they encounter Romeo (Clifton Collins, Jr.), a raucous co-worker with loose ties to the underworld, who risks life and limb to join the Saints crew, perhaps intuiting the sidekick position left vacant by Rocco’s death in the first film. Stateside...
...Harvard initiatives, whose progresses have an uncommonly significant effect on the community, will not be stalled in a manner that is unduly harmful to community residents. We can see the effects of poor financial planning simply by observing the pernicious effects of our stymied science-complex initiative, where plot vacancies and rodent infestations reveal the real implications of a stalled and invasive construction project. Arguments that the economic downturn affects Harvard just like any corporation or institution or that they were pressured to spend by self-interested individuals are unconvincing and do not exonerate Harvard of its responsibility to surrounding...