Word: deadend
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What keeps these excursions along the wild side from being slumming expeditions is Reed's own rapt sympathy for the grifters, freaks and crooks who populate much of his music. Many of his songs are shot through with the kind of deadend romanticism that would stir Bruce Springsteen (who, in fact, appears unbilled and unannounced on Street Hassle, reciting the melancholy introduction to the third vignette). If Lou Reed gives no quarter in his music, neither does he yield to sensationalism or condescension. "You know," he sings in Street Hassle, "some people got no choice/ And they can never...
...chance to get into any depth. Gittis is a nickel-and-dimer trying to boost himself into the big time. He wears sharp, fussy suits and throws out a line of bright chatter. But there are still times when he sounds like the dumb cop on the deadend Chinatown beat. All this is fine, but it is all there is. Chandler made Philip Marlowe into a paladin. For Polanski and Towne, Gittis is simply a protagonist who has nothing at stake, a kind of genial guide through all the thickets of plot...
...state had rejected his plea for a review. He was also in solitary confinement-voluntarily and indefinitely -because his testimony against alleged killers in two other trials had led to reports that mobsters were offering $50,000 to have him murdered. Geraway, 37, would probably still be in that deadend fix were it not for Steven Duke, a quixotic law professor from Yale with a penchant for seemingly hopeless cases...
Director Fleischer and Scenarist Silliphant are clearly interested in pulling off a neat surprise. What they sacrifice for the sake of a dramatic punch is any adequate depth or understanding of the loneliness, aimlessness and deadend desperation that might drive such a man as Kilvinsky, portrayed as a good cop and a decent human being. Like The New Centurions itself, the scene is efficient, proficient, even exciting, but so glib it finally becomes false...
Indeed, many feel that the path is a deadend. The worn tactics--lobbying (by students or by college presidents), obstructive sit-ins, and certainly aimless violence--now have questionable influence on the decisions that are made in the offices that count in Washington. What they do influence is the way Nixon foists those decisions on the public. The reaction to the Cambodian incursion of 1970 did not instruct Nixon not to invade Laos six months later; rather it taught him how to time his actions and manage the press. Strategy seems sometimes to focus more on what the Administration...