Word: botch
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Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year. On the naturalistic level, Francis Coppola's film is a botch, a hoot. The two main characters-Rusty-James (Matt Dillon), a 17-year-old punk who figures he moves with the swagger of stardom, and his older brother the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), tired of being an outlaw legend in Rusty-James' eyes-are little more than the sum of their mannerisms. Their father (Dennis Hopper) is a philosophizing sot who comes and goes with the whim. Rusty-James' girlfriend (Diane Lane) is a mere...
...that is the surprising part. It would have been so easy for the yuk-meisters of Bow St. to botch this up. The magazine that bears the group's name, that semi-monthly, pseudo-intellectual, masturbatory, unfunny, sub-collegiate journal, gives even sign that the Poonies would use People as a vehicle to make fun of the folks who can't understand the subtle humor of their magazine. But they didn't do that. Rather, they accepted People--and People's people, subjects and readers alike--on their own terms and emerged triumphantly...
...Zane Grey could have told in 30 pages and John Ford shown in 30 minutes. They should have realized that narrative coherence is to Cimino as a snake is to an elephant: he doesn't ignore it so much as trample over it. The Deer Hunter was a botch as a story, but it had redeeming social delirium. No such luck with Heaven's Gate. An eye for portentous vistas and a yen for pretentious allegory-just those factors that won The Deer Hunter its raves and Oscars-proved Cimino's undoing when he moved from Viet...
...case, openly advocating fair play, the merit system, and the rights of privacy within the same declaration. Only an American would be so impatient as to prevent rumors from dying out on their own. It must be said too that only a male chauvinist American could make such a botch of chivalry...
China clearly had not won a decisive military victory that would have achieved the stated goals of the invasion: to "punish" the Vietnamese and to dis courage them from future bor der harassments. As military operations go, the invasion was something of a botch. It had been telegraphed in advance, and had thereby robbed the Chinese army of the element of surprise. The Vietnamese were able to keep their regular army units out of action as the Chinese launched "human wave" charges in their assault across the border and early in the righting even employed horseback troops with tootling buglers...