Word: actioneers
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...board with Chandni Chowk to China. For, as any video nerd-historian will tell you, the two most exciting foreign movie industries of the past few decades have been Hong Kong and India. While European filmmakers went inwardly minimalist, those teeming Asian cinemas generated robust entertainment of pinwheeling action and violence (Hong Kong) and unabashed sentiment and music (Bollywood). Different in temperament, but alike in their vigor and brio, they were both exotic and oddly familiar to their American admirers. We realized that the radiant assurance of old-Hollywood movies hadn't died, it had just been reincarnated abroad...
...results of this genetic experiment are mixed. Chandni Chowk (named for a working-class neighborhood in Delhi) is probably a decent sampler for Americans who've never seen a full-out Bollywood musical, since it goes heavy on the action scenes and light on the big dance numbers. The movie does include other conventions of the genre, such as the need of a young man to both rebel against his father figure and please him, and the melodramatic abasing of the protagonist; but these are familiar from Hollywood films, so they won't strike the uneducated viewer as unduly weird...
...culture are fun, the Indian bits much less so. Yuan, who's worked mostly in the States, has a lovely gravity otherwise missing from the enterprise. And it's always great to see Liu, who bounded onto the Hong Kong screen as the head-shaved star of such '70s action classics as Challenge of the Masters and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; his lingering impact in these roles led ex-fanboy Quentin Tarantino to cast him as a mob potentate in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and as the white-bearded Pai Mei in Kill Bill...
...Alexandra Van Horn v. Lisa Torti. The case alleged that Torti worsened the injuries suffered by Van Horn by yanking her "like a rag doll" from a wrecked car on Nov. 1, 2004, thus rendering Van Horn a paraplegic. The court found that Torti wasn't protected from legal action under California's current Good Samaritan laws...
...there is little apparent daylight between them on the urgency of action once they take office. "I agree with Larry [on macroeconomic policy] - or maybe I should say Larry agrees with me," Geithner has joked. And as Treasury Secretary, he will oversee the most critical component of any sustainable recovery plan: getting a still wounded financial system functioning again. Colleagues say Geithner is loyal to Paulson, but that doesn't mean "he would have done things exactly the way [Paulson] did them," says a source. Geithner, for example, wants to overhaul the dysfunctional, taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP...