Word: feral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Long before Watergate confirmed the worst fears of his enemies, Nixon was a perfect model for caricature. Foes saw him as a rootless mutant, sui generis, combining McCarthy's feral atavism with Machiavelli's cunning intellect. Friends perceived him as a courageous champion of basic American values. They remain united in the belief that he suffered a martyr's fate at the hands of the liberal aristocracy whose reign he challenged. For years, Watergate gave the bashers the better of the argument...
GREAT BALLS OF FIRE. This biopic stamps demon rocker Jerry Lee Lewis as a feral innocent in a time warp, instead of a sexual threat for Middle America. Dennis Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee with a nicely calculating recklessness, and Winona Ryder is hypnotically enigmatic as the singer's nymphet bride...
GREAT BALLS OF FIRE. This bio-pic stamps demon rocker Jerry Lee Lewis as a feral innocent in a time warp, instead of cottoning to the sexual and class danger he held for Middle America. But Dennis Quaid inhabits Jerry Lee with a nicely calculating recklessness, and Winona Ryder is hypnotically enigmatic as the singer's nymphet bride...
...workman Sparrow (Mikhail Zhigalov) include a legacy of family violence, a stretch in a work camp, virtual gangsterism in the cemetery where he works as a gravedigger, and a dangerous weakness for vodka. There are performances of enchanting sweetness from Anton Tabakov as a young co-worker and of feral malignity from Valeri Shalnykh as a mock-friendly gang enforcer. But the most memorable scenes show Sparrow alone with his cacophony of fears, climbing arduously up to a bell tower where he can hear the euphony of wind and birds and a distantly remembered lullaby, until a screeching train cuts...
...thunk it? A horror movie with brains and guts. That is, as it happens, the theme of George A. Romero's Monkey Shines: a battle of intellect vs. instinct, the moral vs. the feral, Allan man vs. Ella monkey. Ella learns to know Allan, through a kind of transspecies ESP, and to love him, with a frightening intensity. He is seized with visions, from Ella's point of view, of the creature's nocturnal rambles as she acts out his jealousy and frustration in the most violent form; and Romero films the images as if through a late-night monkey...