Word: corrupting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know L.A. Confidential has ended when it is both daytime and not raining. In a fine version of the somewhat beefy Ellroy crime novel ostensibly about a strange murder, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in '50s Los Angeles with all its gradations of questionable ethics. Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe turn in fine performances that give us two different approaches to policing, thinking first and hitting later, or vice versa. A reptilian James Cromwell and slick Kevin Spacey round out a fine cast and a finer tale. Could this...
...minor vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure, romantic rue and an almost casual murderousness...
SEOUL: South Korea, it would seem, has cleaned house. Frustrated by its fall from economic grace and tired of the corrupt and self-serving regimes of the past four decades, voters Thursday elected a man who has been outsider, dissident, and victim of the government for most of those 40 years...
...Perez Balladares appointment is more controversial than Ritter, who has thrived in politics despite his close association with the corrupt Noriega regime. Robert MacMillan, a New York lawyer who was a member of the Panama Canal Commission from 1989 to 1994 and its chairman for a year, says with Ritter as canal czar, "anybody who thinks that politics will be kept out of the Panama Canal is smoking pot and inhaling...
...trials. As soon as the Africans start having legal difficulties, the film shifts to make a sham out of the American judicial system. The very framework which winds up championing the Africans' cause with morality and persuasiveness is portrayed, in turn, as incompetent, overly bureaucratic and corrupt, to further sympathy for the Africans. The audience was so drowned in their white liberal guilt by the end that they seemed almost disappointed when the American system proved to work in the end, and to be based on virtue, eloquence and justice...