- brings a lot of laughs
The debut novel from the author of Summer at Gaglow, called "a near-seamless meshing of family feeling, history and imagination" by the New York Times Book Review. Escaping gray London in 1972, a beautiful, determined mother takes her daughters, aged 5 and 7, to Morocco in search of adventure, a better life, and maybe love. Hideous Kinky follows two little English girls -- the five-year-old narrator and Bea, her seven-year-old sister -- as they struggle to establish some semblance of normal life on a trip to Morocco with their hippie mother, Julia. Once in Marrakech, Julia immerses herself in Sufism and her quest for personal fulfillment, while her daughters rebel -- the older by trying to recreate her English life, the younger by turning her hopes for a father o! n a most unlikely candidate.
Shocking and wonderful, Hideous Kinky is at once melancholy and hopeful. A remarkable debut novel from one of England's finest young writers, Hideous Kinky was inspired by the author's own experiences as a child. Esther Freud, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, lived in Marrakech for one and a half years with her older sister Bella and her mother. Hideous Kinky is now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet ("Titanic," "Sense and Sensibility").
Hideous Kinky begins as a small, cheerful autobiographical novel following Thurber's variation on Wordsworth: "Humor is emotional chaos recollected in tranquillity." In the mid-1960s, two girls, ages 5 and 7, travel with their mother from London to Marrakech. Also along for the ride are John, Mum's boyfriend, and Maretta, John's wife. Though the author is a descendant of Sigmund Freud, the title of her first book h! as little to do with the pleasure principle. Instead, it is t! he only phrase the sisters have heard Maretta speak, one that quickly becomes an all-purpose epithet: "One of the shepherds whistled and the dogs slung to the ground. Bea raised an eyebrow as she passed me. 'Hideous kinky,' she whispered." Esther Freud's vocabulary and tone veer easily from the childlike to the more sophisticated, particularly when she recounts speech or circumstances beyond a child's comprehension.Once the group arrives in Marrakech, John and Maretta split off, and Mum hooks up with various men and pursues spirituality. The children, meanwhile, want nothing more than to be normal--or at least not to be so embarrassed by their mother's Islamic fervor: "'Oh Mum, please...' I was prepared to beg. 'Please don't be a Sufi.'" In Hideous Kinky, people appear and disappear with little reason or explanation. Though most of the characters are differentiated by one outstanding feature, Bilal, the itinerant builder and magician's apprentice who be! comes one of Mum's lovers, is more complex. The narrator loves and trusts him from the start, and when she asks him if he will eventually return to England with them, "Bilal closed his eyes and began to hum along with Om Kalsoum, whose voice crackled and wept through a radio in the back of the café."
Hideous Kinky is curiously divided. The first half is a lark. The girls explore Marrakech, picking up the language and even passing themselves off as beggars. The family's only worries are about money, and these are soon cured by the next bank draft from their father. But the second half is more melancholy. Mum's religious zeal becomes rather less endearing, and as the girls' adventures turn more dangerous, local rituals and customs begin to lose their charm: "I didn't like to think about the camel festival. The camel, garlanded in flowers, collected us from our house in the Mellah, and we had followed it out of the city and high into the mountains i! n a procession of singing." The parade ends, however, with th! e anima l's beheading. "Occasionally I looked at Bea to see if she was running over these events like I was, the sound effects living their own life behind her eyes, but she gave nothing away."
In the end, Hideous Kinky is a novel less about an exotic country seen through an innocent's eyes than about family, about having a deeply embarrassing mother, an older sister who does everything before you, and a distant father. It escapes sentimentality through simplicity: "Bilal was my Dad. No one denied it when I said so." The author, her sister, and her mother spent two years in Morocco, and while Esther Freud may not have invented her subject, she has re-created it with a light touch and delicate irony. Hideous Kinky journeys back to the early 1970s to Marrakesh, that hippy mecca for everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Gillies MacKinnon, the director of this movie. Here you'll find one nice but confused middle-class young woman escaping the daily! grind of a drab London with her two young daughters in tow. Whereas Esther Freud's book was told from the younger girl's perspective, the film-script places Julia centre-stage as she searches for what she describes wistfully as "the annihilation of the ego."
Though fresh from her Titanic experience, Kate Winslet is no drippy hippy, bringing a refreshing feistiness to her role and looking fetching swathed in diaphanous layers. As her two daughters, Bella Riza (Bea, the wide-eyed younger one) and Carrie Mullan (Lucy, the sensible one) are brilliant discoveries--unselfconscious, charmingly quirky, and enjoying a camaraderie that belies their difference in characters. Completing the family unit is Julia's lover, the endearingly unreliable Bilal (a fiery performance from Saïd Taghmaoui). When the money runs out, their adventures begin and the resilience and practicality of the girls is contrasted throughout with the dreaminess of their mother, her sense of duty vyi! ng with her quest for self-discovery. Visually, it's a veritab! le feast as we're pitched from the color and cacophony of the marketplace to the dusty harshness of the mountains. And that elusive title--which is never explained in the film--is in fact a phrase coined by the girls as a term of approbation. --Harriet SmithTwo little girls are taken by their mother to Morocco on a 1960s pilgrimage of self-discovery. For Mum, it is not just an escape from the grinding conventions of English life but a quest for personal fulfilment; her children, however, seek something more solid and stable amidst the shifting desert sands. 'Just open the book and begin, and instantly you will be first of all charmed, then intrigued and finally moved by this fascinating story' - "Spectator".Hideous Kinky journeys back to the early 1970s to Marrakesh, that hippy mecca for everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Gillies MacKinnon, the director of this movie. Here you'll find one nice but confused middle-class young woman escaping the daily grind o! f a drab London with her two young daughters in tow. Whereas Esther Freud's book was told from the younger girl's perspective, the film-script places Julia centre-stage as she searches for what she describes wistfully as "the annihilation of the ego."
Though fresh from her Titanic experience, Kate Winslet is no drippy hippy, bringing a refreshing feistiness to her role and looking fetching swathed in diaphanous layers. As her two daughters, Bella Riza (Bea, the wide-eyed younger one) and Carrie Mullan (Lucy, the sensible one) are brilliant discoveries--unselfconscious, charmingly quirky, and enjoying a camaraderie that belies their difference in characters. Completing the family unit is Julia's lover, the endearingly unreliable Bilal (a fiery performance from Saïd Taghmaoui). When the money runs out, their adventures begin and the resilience and practicality of the girls is contrasted throughout with the dreaminess of their mother, her sense of duty vying with ! her quest for self-discovery. Visually, it's a veritable feast! as we'r e pitched from the color and cacophony of the marketplace to the dusty harshness of the mountains. And that elusive title--which is never explained in the film--is in fact a phrase coined by the girls as a term of approbation. --Harriet Smith
Though fresh from her Titanic experience, Kate Winslet is no drippy hippy, bringing a refreshing feistiness to her role and looking fetching swathed in diaphanous layers. As her two daughters, Bella Riza (Bea, the wide-eyed younger one) and Carrie Mullan (Lucy, the sensible one) are brilliant discoveries--unselfconscious, charmingly quirky, and enjoying a camaraderie that belies their difference in characters. Completing the family unit is Julia's lover, the endearingly unreliable Bilal (a fiery performance from Saïd Taghmaoui). When the money runs out, their adventures begin and the resilience and practicality of the girls is contrasted throughout with the dreaminess of their mother, her sense of duty vying with her quest for self-discovery. Visually, it's a veritable feast as we're pitched from the color and cacophony of the marketplace to the dusty hars! hness of the mountains. And that elusive title--which is never! explain ed in the film--is in fact a phrase coined by the girls as a term of approbation. --Harriet SmithNetherlands released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital Stereo ), Dutch ( Subtitles ), WIDESCREEN, SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Scene Access, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: Hideous Kinky is set in a time about 30 years ago when it was not uncommon for young British free-thinkers to cross into the next continent with virtually nothing in their pockets. They left their proper schooling and part-time jobs behind to make their trek into a poor, desert country in Africa in search of themselves and their spirituality. And so this story begins with a young English hippie woman who has brought her two young daughters with her on her journey. Though the book is narrated by the youngest of the two daughters, it is not yet clear that this is so in the scree! nplay version of Hideous Kinky. ...Hideous Kinky ( Marrakech express )Original 1998 Theatrical Release British Mini Movie Poster.
Measures 12" x 16" (inches)
The poster is single sided, rolled, mint and unused and will be shipped to you packed in plastic tubing and then inside strong pvc pipe for maximum protection.
Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. cons! titutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.
Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.
More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democra! tic global society.
(20010723)Empire is a sweepin! g book w ith a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology, economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke University's literature program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a geopolitical force.Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that "the multitude" will ! transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jefferson's constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.
S. C. Gwynneâs Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most r! emarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epi! c saga o f the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specif! ically designed to fight them: the six-gun.
The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynneâs exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroadsâ"a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.
Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend.
S. C. Gwynneâs account of these events is meticulous! ly researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thr! illingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.
EMPIRE - DVD MovieObserving that "the difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire," Ferguson stresses that the British did do much good for humanity in their quest for domination: promotion of the free movement of goods, capital, and labor and a common rule of law and governance chief among them. "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity," he writes. The challenge for the U.S., he argues, is for it to use! its undisputed power as a force for positive change in the world and not to fall into some of the same traps as the British before them.
Covering a wide range of topics, including the rise of consumerism (initially fueled by a desire for coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar), the biggest mass migration in history (20 million emigrants between the early 1600s and the 1950s), the impact of missionaries, the triumph of capitalism, the spread of the English language, and globalization, this is a brilliant synthesis of various topics and an extremely entertaining read. --Shawn Carkonen
What do you get when you put twelve lively kids together with a father -- a famous efficiency expert -- who believes families can run like factories, and a mother who is his partner in everything except discipline? You get a hilarious tale of growing up that has made generations of kids and adults alike laugh along with the Gilbreths in Cheaper by the Dozen.
Translated into more than fifty-three languages and made into a classic film starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, Cheaper by the Dozen is a delightfully enduring story of family life at the turn of the 20th century.
What elevates She's All That above the realm of stan! dard teen fare is its mixture of good-natured fairy-tale roman! ce and s urprisingly clear-eyed view of high school social strata. The lines of class are demarcated as clearly as if in a Jane Austen novel, but the satire is equally deflating and affectionate. Sure, high school could be bad sometimes, but it was lots of fun too; this is a movie good-natured enough to take time out for an extended hip-hop dance number at the prom. Director Robert Iscove (who also helmed the Brandy-starring TV adaptation of Cinderella) has also assembled a great young cast, including a scene-stealing Anna Paquin as Zach's no-nonsense sister, Kieran Culkin as Laney's geeky brother, and a stupidly goofy Matthew Lillard as a Real World cast member whose arrival shakes things up a little too much. And amidst all the comedy and prom drama, you'd be hard-pressed to find two teen stars as talented, attractive, and appealing as Prinze and Cook. Prinze is an approachable and sensitive jock, though it's Cook who's the true star, investing Laney with confidence, ! humor, and heart. Like Zach, you'll be hard-pressed not to fall in love with her. By the story's end, both Cook and the film will have charmed the socks off of you. --Mark EnglehartHot screen favorites Freddie Prinze Jr. (SHE'S ALL THAT, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER) and Julia Stiles (10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU) sizzle in a fun and sexy comedy where the magic of first love collides with the challenges of real life! From the moment they meet amid the chaos of college in New York City, Al (Prinze) and Imogen (Stiles) begin a romantic journey where true love often competes with the temptation to stray from commitment! As time passes and an outrageous array of friends enter the scene, they'll celebrate all the highs and confront all the lows that greet their passionate affair. Also featuring Henry Winkler (THE WATERBOY), Selma Blair (CRUEL INTENTIONS), and Shawn Hatosy (OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE, THE FACULTY) in a stellar cast -- you'll want to join this irresistible! couple as they face the future ... with some wildly unexpecte! d result s!Al (Freddie Prinze Jr., from She's All That and I Know What You Did Last Summer) and Imogen (Julia Stiles from 10Â Things I Hate About You) take turns narrating the story of their college romance. Al has a celebrity chef for a father (an amusing turn from Henry Winkler) and a rising porn star for a best friend (Zak Orth). The dialogue is stale, the story flounders, and the movie can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a sweet romance or a social satire. Down to You keeps dropping into odd fantasy bits that have nothing to do with, well, much of anything. But all the stars--including Selma Blair (Cruel Intentions) and Shawn Hatosy (Outside Providence) are pleasant and well groomed (well, except for Hatosy, who bears the brunt of being the poster boy for every fad of the '90s), and the soundtrack (featuring Cibo Matto, early David Bowie, Yo La Tengo, and others) is excellent. --Bret FetzerParty Down is a Starz original se! ries about a group of struggling dreamers who are stuck working for tips while waiting for their big break. As employees of the L.A. catering company âParty Down,â these misfits mingle with guests at everything from sweet sixteen parties to the most lavish Hollywood soirees. Follow these engaging wannabes as they wait on guests while waiting on something better to come along.
Stills from Party Down: Season 1 (Click for larger image)
