Little Criminals is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Randy Newman. Like most of Newman's work, the album eschews traditional pop-music themes ("I'll Be Home" is the only love song on the album) in favor of musical story-telling, often featuring quirky characters and cynical views. The first song on the album– " Short People"– became a hit single in its own right. The album itself peaked at #9 on the US Billboard 200 chart, Newman's highest-charting album to date. In Hazard was something of aflop. Virginia Woolf was interested but felt that between the stormand the people “there’s a gap, in which there is some want ofstrength.” Ford Maddox Ford, on the other hand, saw it as amasterpiece of a peculiar kind: This film considers people, most especially children, living at or beyond the margins of society. It is a worthy companion to Bunuel's "Los Olvidados". The central character, Des, is an 11 year old boy, the leader of a group of delinquents. From the outset, he is loathsome and (seemingly) without any redeeming value. The viewer's reaction to this character is disturbing; how can you hate an 11 year old. The story follows Des through one vicious episode after another. Slowly, ever so subtly, the little boy inside the monster is revealed, and circumstances which have created the monster examined.

Little Criminals' has to be one of the most depressing films I've ever seen; more so when I consider that, in reality, there must be thousands of children out there condemned to lives of crime and misery as a result of their home situations.On the other hand, itmight be just a little distressing for a writer in Elysium to lookdown and see himself in such company—amid the odd, the recovered,the sui generis, the special cases, the lesser aristocracy. That is,however, where Richard Hughes may best belong, and the farther wecome from the time in which his four novels were written, the morecomfortable he appears there.

My Aim Is True (the title is a line from “Alison”) is in the Top Twenty in Britain; it is likely to go higher, as Costello recently managed to get himself busted for taking his electric guitar into the streets. The LP is already getting airplay on American FM stations, and a tour of sorts is set for late fall. How far Costello can go — especially given the unfortunate timing that surrounds his assumed first name — remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that once he is heard, he is going to shake up a lot of his erstwhile peers and make many musicians whom he would not consider his peers seem quite irrelevant — he has the musical sophistication, which is to say access to the musical credibility, to do that, as, at the moment, the Sex Pistols don’t. Gemini Awards: Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Program (Sabrina Grdevich) Christgau, Robert (October 31, 1977). "Christgau's Consumer Guide". The Village Voice. New York . Retrieved April 29, 2013. I highly recommend this film to anybody interested in socio-dynamics, especially because although set in Canada I can say the dynamics are universal because of the way it mirrored my own. Following the killing, Cory becomes afraid of Des and wants nothing to do with him, going as far as asking his stepfather to protect him. As Des approaches the vehicle, he is confronted by the school police officer who reminds him he will be 12 years old in a month's time. Hearing that, Des opts to flee the schoolyard.I have seen one or twonotices that quite miss all the points and resolve themselves intosaying that it is or isn’t better than [Joseph Conrad’s] Typhoon.It isn’t, of course, better than Typhoon. Typhoon was written by agreat writer who was a man. In Hazard was written by someone inhuman. . . and consummate in the expression ofinhumanities. Far more compelling to Emily is asudden understanding vouchsafed to her in an ordinary moment, when“she suddenly realized who she was.” That ontological moment thatcomes to—all? many? some?—human children has come to her: theunderstanding of her possession of a singular living being, herself,whom she must now be, through childhood and growing up, forever. Thisis a situation to ponder: Elvis Costello’s debut album brought home to me just how timid Little Criminals really is. Costello’s best songs are anything but timid, but they’re as intelligent as some of Newman’s finest, as endearingly elusive in their meanings, and funny in the same bitter, self-deprecating manner. They are also, like Newman’s signature songs, very weird. Costello, a twenty-two-year-old excomputer operator who grew up in Liverpool and now looks like an underfed, misanthropic Buddy Holly, is proof that not only are things quite strange in England today, they are capable of getting a lot stranger. Record World said that the single "Baltimore" "is as serious as 'Short People' was funny, and its haunting melody and dramatic lyric linger well." [9]