More recently, "I've Loved You So Long" was, though compelling, tamed and compromised by its ending, and, too often this year, strong tales seemed to falter and lose heart; everything directed by James Gray is worth watching, but nothing in "We Own the Night" could match its velvety beginning and the confused furor of its car chase (the single best sequence of 2008).
Writing (screenplays, novels) kept him going, and though for a long time he ignored "the strongest tale he has: that of his own life", LA Diaries - "clear-eyed, unsentimental, necessarily self-indulgent" - does "it all justice".
The people in these stories -- with the exception of the narrator of "Calling," the strongest tale in this volume -- feel oddly synthetic as well, as though they were somehow representative types: generic adulterers, generic sufferers of midlife crises.
The strongest tales embrace a strain of barnyard humor that is matched by the robust performances of actors who convey an earthy jocularity.
The strongest tales are those fueled by the verbal energy and magpie language that made "Brief Wondrous Life" so memorable and that capture Yunior's efforts to commute between two cultures, Dominican and American, while always remaining an outsider.
Mr. Baum builds a strong narrative from the tale of how this big dysfunctional family made a lot of cold beer and money that ultimately financed conservative causes via the Republican Party and the Heritage Foundation.
In these passages we are reminded of the Malick who made Badlands and Days of Heaven, earthy tales with strong narrative backbones and an uncanny eye for detail.
We want a tale with a strong narrative spine about a tough NBA big man who was scared to reveal his sexual identify.
Clearly a strong, suspenseful tale requires far more than the ideas I've written about here.
Finally, our results serve as a strong cautionary tale for studies investigating the regulatory function of human sequences in classical vertebrate model organisms, whether the observed variation in enhancer activity is due to specifics of each transgenesis technique, or to true biological differences in trans environments across large evolutionary time-scales.
