Word: flashing
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...screenplay, by Gilliam and co-Python Michael Palin, is eclectic to the point of being wholly derivative, both thematically and visually. It draws on everything from the anti-modern stance of A Clockwork Orange, to the scenic flash of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the overt tackiness of the original Flash Gordon: yet it remains an underwhelming story. The adventure involves Kevin, a young, modern-age Briton (not so much played as walked through by unknown Craig Warnock), whose parents ive in subservience to hundreds of whirring, useless kitchen apparati and sit transfixed as horrific gameshows prance across...
...university don are merely two examples of the unconvincing stereotyping that pervades the film. Intent on criticizing the stuffiness and conservatism of the British aristocracy, director Hudson seemingly has forgotten that any portrayal--particularly a negative one--requires detail to convince. But detail does not appear. Instead, scenes flash by disjointedly: Gielgud and his colleague sip port and discuss school spirit; the Prince of Wales languorously puffs a cigarette and tries to convince Liddell to run the preliminary heat on Sunday "for the love of country...
...resulting dialect has considerable appeal. Often, Hoban merges two words into one, with fascinating results. A woman is a "wooman," says Riddley, because "she's the 1 with the woom." The leader of the mutant survivors of the great flash is known as "the Ardship of Cambry," one who suffers many an "ardship." The most chilling pun has to do with the central myth of Riddley's time, an adaptation of the only document left from before the flash, the Christian legend of St. Eustace. In "the Eusa story," Eusa tampers with "the Littl Shyning Man" and creates the cataclysm...
...language of Riddley Walker is unfamiliar, the story it tells rings with unmistakable urgency. Riddley runs away from his "crowd"--his community of foragers--and becomes unwittingly drawn in to Goodparley's obsessive quest to regain the technology of explosives. Tantalized by the legendary ability of man before the flash to build "boats in the air and picters on the wind," Goodparley determines to recreate the power that created these mysteries; when he meets Riddley, he thinks he has found the first breakthrough: the ingredients of gunpowder...
Riddley mistrusts Goodparley's discovery--all the more when Goodparley lets on that his real goal is to harness the power that caused the great flash. Riddley's grounds for skepticism--expressed most succinctly by a fellow traveller--sound authentic not only in a land of foragers and howling dogs but in a world of bureaucrats and soaring weaponry...