Word: raffishness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...acid. Working up imitations of it has become one of modern Hollywood's minor vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure, romantic rue and an almost casual murderousness...
...money she has inherited but doesn't really want. Equally unlikely for a woman of her time, she is an industrialist. That church is a product of her glass factory, and it is intended as reparation to another clergyman who has been exiled for being seen in her raffish company...
...writer's close, conflicted ties to his birthplace give his work its special flavor, not to mention its distinctive sense of the not quite familiar. Richler's raffish characters could be from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, except that they are nuts about hockey, spice their conversation with French as well as Yiddish and have legal access to Cuban cigars...
...When We Were Kings like the Ghosts of Kinshasa Future: the Foreman and Ali of today. One became a preacher and found a rich comic voice that has finally made him an endearing figure in sports. The other is afflicted with Parkinson's syndrome, his grace palsied, his old raffish rhetoric muted. The King is a physical pauper now, and at his sight we age and ache. His mind, however, is not so impaired, nor is his taste for raillery. Ali recently saw the film and phoned Gast to express his appreciation. The champ also said he remembered Gast...
...huge silver ball slides ever so deliberately down the pulsing neon face of a building in Times Square, and off leaps one of the world's most wildly imaginative entrepreneurs. It is Richard Branson, the raffish British tycoon who has splashed his company's Virgin logo on everything from airlines to a bridal service. The occasion: the opening of a $15 million, biggest-anywhere, 75,000-sq.-ft. new Virgin music-and-entertainment megastore...