Word: clever
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Bentsen's jab at George Bush for calling a rented Houston hotel suite his home got an appreciative laugh. But it will take more than a clever line for Bentsen to make Texans think Dukakis is one of them. As his running mate, Bentsen has one overriding responsibility: to put the Lone Star State's 29 electoral votes in the Democratic column in November. No Democrat has won the White House in this century without Texas...
There are other apparent influences, notably Woody Allen's Bananas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. But actually, Parador is not nearly as sophisticated as all this borrowing would suggest. It is simply a Hollywood comedy, albeit a rather clever and funny one. And that is sufficient...
...Clever fellow, our fricasseed Freddy. Now he stalks the dreams of his posse's teenage children. A vision of loathsomeness with his moldy black felt hat, scalded face, red-and-green-striped sweater and right-hand glove with steel "finger-knives," he lures each sleeping adolescent to a convenient boiler room (every building in town has one) or into their grungiest fears. And if they don't wake up in time, he executes them. Kind of harrowing, the number of Elm Street kids who die in their sleep. As one boy says, "It's not exactly a safe place...
Never mind a candidate's stand on the issues, Sheehy warns us. After all, she argues, the issues have become increasingly diffuse, "too complicated to submit to clever political slogans." The parties have become virtually interchangeable. The candidates themselves are often big on rhetoric but thin on specifics, preferring instead to stake out popular, non-controversial positions (opposing new taxes and "big government" while supporting patriotism, "good jobs at good wages", and a "war on drugs...
True to the genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg...