Word: tragically
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...biographical approach is far more successful in The Long Night of Lady Day, a lovely portrait of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Using old film footage, stills, recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues, the documentary traces a tragic life, from Holiday's troubled childhood (at a girls' institution, she was once punished by being locked overnight in a room with a corpse) through her angry encounters with racism to the mounting drug problems that eventually killed her at age 44. The research is impressive; witnesses range from Bandleader Artie Shaw to the warden's secretary at the federal...
...treatment, became involved in violence. Says Treffert: "Most states ended up with three standards for civil commitment: danger to self, danger to others and gravely disabled. We need a fourth standard, for that patient who is obviously ill but not yet deteriorated to the point of being dangerous." The tragic history of the New York ferry slashing underscores just how serious that danger...
...Shakespearean drama, both tragic and comic, the storms and calamities that shake the sublunary globe are reflections of turmoil in the hearts of men. So too, when the state of nature is disordered, do they often portend the same upset in the nature of the state. It therefore seemed a distinctly Shakespearean augury when Typhoon Gading drowned Manila in torrential rains last week, sending coconut trees swaying wildly in the wind and plunging much of the city deep into darkness. For in recent weeks, tremors and uncertainties have had all of Philippine politics listing between tragedy and comedy, swept...
...little substance to really care about, although it's hard not to be bowled over by 20-year-old Tyson's exotic beauty, and Michael Caine as chief bad guy has never been sleazier. Simone's evil sadistic ponce turns out to be a standard slick pimp, and the tragic Cathy is just another spacey blonde waif with a drug problem--and with a hard-to-believe twist, as we discover at the end of the movie...
During the movie, you grow to view George as a tragic figure, doomed never to succeed and always to suffer. But at the end, he walks away from what should be breaking his heart, and finds happiness under a greasy truck, side by side with his friend the fat mechanic. He's too adaptable, too accepting of his fate to live up to the Lear-esque expectations he creates. But expectations aside, Hoskins' performance is so human, so natural, so believable, that it makes this otherwise unspectacular film very much worth seeing...