Word: cynical
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...cornpone saga of the "true West." Saul is one of those monstrous Hollywood moths who skirt the flames of venality, yet never get torched. All three men are the progeny of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, that emetically funny moral jeremiad hurled with lethal precision at the cynic American psyche...
...sections of the American psyche. A sneaking preference for what once, generations ago, was called square has broken into the open. Certain values like stable family, satisfyingly useful hard work, competition and excellence have reappeared here and there: the moral equivalents of Bass Weejuns and button-down shirts. A cynic would say that the culture's manic quest for novelty has simply exhausted some of its adventurously kinky experiments (open marriage, bisexuality, a doctrinaire celibacy, banana smoking and roller disco) and so returned to the Real Thing, temporarily no doubt. It is all transient fashion, the cynic would...
Walt Whitman called it "the Presidentiad." Woodrow Wilson referred to it as a "great and solemn referendum." The average voter, whoever he may be, looks on it as a recognition of his own importance. The cynic may think it a waste of good time and money, but the patriot leaps to the ballot box with an unholy joy shining...
...written by many of the same people who brought you Not The New York Times--is an ideal excuse to put of writing your Gov paper, to relax with when it's too gauche to drink beer and watch football with your undershirt on, junk food for the intellectual cynic. If read slowly, selectively, this compendium of facetiae should beat just about any conceivable true-to-life rehashes of the grey cripple of a decade that will limp (or roll) off to oblivion in just one more month...
...shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...