Word: flashes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...countries around the world. He must manage a sprawling 15,000-person bureaucracy. He must justify his policies to a Congress that lately has seemed ever more inclined to put strings on his freedom of action. And he must do all this in a world of instant communications that flash events in far-off nations onto American TV screens as fullblown crises, moments after they occur...
Similar calls for restraint were heard at commemorative ceremonies last week in Gdynia and Szczecin, the other flash points of the 1970 revolts. The observances themselves could have been construed as a challenge to Moscow, but the Kremlin was apparently prepared to swallow them, for the sake of helping the Polish Communist Party reassert its authority. After weeks of roller-coaster crisis, leaders of the party and Solidarity, the foundation of Poland's independent unions, appear to have reached at least a temporary meeting of minds. One White House aide, delighted that the threat of an immediate Soviet invasion...
Still, the movies keep trying-especially after the success of the Star Wars saga, which has comic-adventure roots. Two big-budget Christmas releases illustrate the perils and pleasures of going to popular culture's sub-basement in search of material. Flash Gordon, which expensive but unpretentious, works; Popeye, which reflects the critical and sociological chat about comics in recent years, does not. Indeed, it is one of the most grievously miscalculated movies in recent memory, claustrophobic in manner, mean in spirit, downright grotesque to look...
This is not to imply that Flash is an art film. Its adapters had an easier task than Popeye's did, since the comic's creator, Alex Raymond, was the most movieish of illustrators. His space fantasies are replicable on a sound stage, because they consisted largely of art deco architecture, primitive emotions and sexy states of undress. One gets a sense that Production Designer Danilo Donati had fun recreating Raymond's visions, that Writer Semple's script was lettered into balloons, and Director Hodges kept a pile of old comic books on hand to suggest...
...actors, one imagines, needed very little help at all, beyond the occasional suggestion to play broadly. As usual, Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo, is bent on destroying the earth and, failing that, making life as unpleasant as possible for Flash (Sam J. Jones), his girlfriend Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) and his pal Dr. Zarkov (Topol). The results of this obsession are colorful: large and small battles, peril to Dale's virtue ("Prepare her for my pleasure," intones Ming at one point), sundry bondage fantasies. The high points are a whip fight staged on a wildly tilting platform...