"The Royal Tenenbaums," opening Dec. 14, is a tale of familial dysfunction, failure and redemption.
A tale of family dysfunction directed by John Wells, the film has a cast that includes Streep, Julia Roberts, Cumberbatch (again), Ewan McGregor and Sam Shepard.
Actually, I thought more of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001), based on the Elfriede Jelinek novel, a shocking tale of dysfunction, showing that the discipline needed for classical music creates violence and pain as a hidden byproduct, like nuclear waste.
It is a prototypical tale of dysfunction in Silicon Valley, where money is nearly as plentiful as ideas and ambitions are more abundant than both: A talented protg outgrows mentor, forms company to take him on, makes an enemy.
Knausgaard's portrait of his cold, authoritarian father, who drank himself to a squalidly premature death, may have scandalised the reading public of Norway, but it's a tale of mild familial dysfunction by comparison with, say, Edward St Aubyn's autobiographical Patrick Melrose series.
In the earlier book, King Lear was adduced to a tale of Midwestern family dysfunction, the Shakespearean plot functioning mainly as a decorative element to assure consumers (and prize-giving juries) that this was not run-of-the-mill dirty realism but bona fide literature.
Really, has there ever been a more perversely entertaining tale of dysfunction than Brown's 11-month stint with the Knicks?
The book, wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type that's disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main Street, isn't chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an "Our Town," Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs.
It is a tale of fear, degradation and abusive dysfunction – a violent and disorientating nightmare with a shiver of Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
This publicly aired tale of dysfunction resulted in Iverson's going on the trading block last summer, until he swore on a stack of hip-hop compact discs to behave.
