Word: cloud
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...CLOUD 9. Andreas Dresen...
...other day I was supposed to go to the German film Cloud 9, otherwise known as the naked-old-people-making-love movie. Then I thought, why spend 90 mins. watching something I can get at home? And I was off to a Cannes Classic screening of David Lean's 1949 The Passionate Friends, from an H.G. Wells novel about a woman (Lean's then-wife Ann Todd) who'd had an affair with someone her age (Trevor Howard) but married a wealthy, older man (Claude Rains). It's not one of the great director's masterpieces...
...Irina Spalko (played by Blanchett with the severe demeanor of Cyd Charisse's Ninotchka in the 1957 MGM musical Silk Stockings and the black bob Charisse sports in The Band Wagon). Rather than the simple matter of conquering the West militarily, Irina is part of a Soviet plot to cloud our minds by getting access to some secret technology that is concealed either in an Area 51 warehouse or in the remotest jungle mountains of Peru. "We will change you, Mr. Jones, all of you, from the inside," she proclaims. "We will turn you into us." Ewww, creepy. Glad that...
...cars. We're in Nevada, near Area 51, and it's 1957, a time of rock 'n' roll (Elvis's "Hound Dog" on the soundtrack), fear of the Soviets (and why not? they've just penetrated a U.S. military base), fear of The Bomb (hey, what's that mushroom cloud on the horizon?) and mass sightings of UFOs (coming right...
Modern Turkey has looked Westward since its staunchly secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed the separation of mosque and state shortly after World War I. The pro-Western political bent did not immediately translate into liberal economics. Corruption, cronyism and protectionism continued to cloud prospects until the 1980s. Even then, after a period of economic liberalization under reformist Prime Minister Turgut Ozal (a pal of Margaret Thatcher's), the old habits died hard. In 2001, Turkey suffered a full-blown financial crisis in which the Turkish currency lost nearly 50% of its value overnight...