Word: small-town
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...little closer to the Arctic Circle than I thought I would end up,” Bybee quipped. “[Syracuse]has all the advantages of a small-town life because it allows us to have a house near the university...
...film’s narrative style, which is free-form and free-associative to a head-spinning degree. Archival footage of outrageous singer-pianist Frances Faye will dissolve into a filmed sequence of desert explorer Sir Wilfred Thesinger, which will morph into a series of still shots from small-town parade, which will change into a picture of a young model wearing a turban and silk shawls. Characters and events tumble by, with nary a clear transition or connection to help us understand where they fall. We cannot make sense of this movie’s methods, just...
...smoke could clear. Dostum, the charismatic warlord who governed Mazar until a Taliban offensive unseated him in 1997, is notorious for his inconstancy and ruthlessness, and he has no intention of ceding authority to the 37-year-old Atta, a rising military star. Atta has curried support like a small-town mayoral candidate, printing up posters of himself to plaster around the city, and Dostum is likely to take that as an affront. "There's a war within a war here," says Dostum aide Sayed Kamil. The area's Persian-speaking Hazara aren't happy about taking orders from either...
...film, after all, is seen through the eyes of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a quiet small-town barber who manages to remain taciturn even as the film’s narrator. Instead of talking, he observes and listens. In this way, he learns that his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini). And by listening to an entrepreneur (Jon Polito) seeking funding for a dry cleaning venture, Ed decides to break out of his hair-cutting rut and put up the money...
Affectlessness is not a quality much prized in movie protagonists, but Billy Bob Thornton, that splendid actor, does it perfectly as Ed Crane, a taciturn small-town barber, circa 1949. Everyone cheats on him--his wife, his business partner, his teen lover, his hotshot lawyer. By the movie's end, he is facing his final comeuppance, deadpan sangfroid still miraculously intact. The ever astonishing Coen brothers say their film was inspired by the spirit of James M. Cain's novels about ill-fated dopes. But the Coens transcend Cain. If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking--hilarious...