Word: dumbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shirt today--23 bucks--think I would pay that for this?" she pointed to a white T which she sported under her tight black and white sundress. "What a rip-off. It's not fair. When is this train going to get moving? God were those shop people dumb. They like thought I was actually wearing this out of the store, not lifting it. Boy. Oh well, can't expect people in these ritzy stores to have too many smarts...
...Jones) means to beguile precocious adolescents of all ages. With nods to L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz) and Children's Author Maurice Sendak, Labyrinth lures a modern Dorothy Gale out of the drab Kansas of real life into a land where the wild things are: deaf-and-dumb doorknobs, feral party animals that toss their heads like volleyballs, a terrier-faced knight and his sheep-dog steed, a silly sage with a talking bird growing out of his head, and an orange-haired hybrid of a buffalo and a gorilla, who walks like Charles Laughton's Hunchback...
...story about people who try to be ruthless, but turn out to have soft spots and warm hearts after all. There are rich people who are bad, poor people who are exploited--i.e. good--dumb cops, dumb blondes, dumb dogs and a lot of other classic on-screen stereotypes which for some reason make audiences laugh as if they haven't seen this movie every summer since they sneaked into their first R-rated movie...
Convoluting the plot further, Stone's middle-aged mistress and her dumb-stud pal decide to blackmail the fashion mogul. While trying to videotape Stone murdering his wife, they succeed only in filming the local police chief with a prostitute in his car. Here, the movie attempts to develop the characters, depicting the plotting woman and her friend as too sensitive to watch the alleged murder on the videotape...
Critic Greil Marcus finds himself defending even dumb pop. "If a Swedish director wanted to make a Rambo," says Marcus, "it wouldn't be very convincing. Only Americans are arrogant, vulgar and moronic enough to make a fantasy like that credible. But I'll put our vulgar moronism versus their refined elitism any day. I'm not saying Chuck Berry is better than Flaubert. But I also don't want to live in a world where there's only one or the other...