Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...There's an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: ... the birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters ... a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost ... Wing nuts exist in both parties, wherever anger and absolutism drive people to believe that their political opponents are their personal enemies...
...playing a U.S. marshal searching for a killer in an insane asylum - benefited from an effective ad spot on the Super Bowl and a week with no other new films in wide release. Scorsese's very limited competition came from fellow world-class auteur Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, another conspiracy thriller set on a windy Massachusetts island. The film took in $179,000 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, reaped encouraging reviews and, yesterday, won Polanski the best director prize at the Berlin Film Festival. It will open wider over the next few weeks...
From the moment he enters Lang's island compound, the Ghost feels thwarted by the P.M. and his staff, led by Lang's probable mistress (Kim Cattrall). Proving that a political campaign is war by other means, they form a phalanx around Lang's achievements and vulnerabilities; their job is not to help the Ghost but to contain and confound him. His adversaries include not just people but machines. The movie begins with an empty car on the Martha's Vineyard ferry - its driver vanished, and soon found dead - and ends with another car-related death. In the two intervening...
...difference between Hollywood and European films: the first has to keep you jazzed every minute, while the second assumes that, having bought your ticket, you'll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details. In that sense, The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth. Alexandre Desplat...
...mostly in Massachusetts, the movie was shot at Berlin's Babelsburg studio, where Polanski earlier created the Warsaw Ghetto for his most explicitly autobiographical film, The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. The Ghost Writer is unlikely to earn him such acclaim. The villainy surrounding its hero is vast but not, in Oscar terms, important; and there are a few giggle moments, as when one of Lang's women pops into the Ghost's bed. But we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some...