Word: gung
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...master at building social comedy to the apex of hysteria, then pulling a happy-ending miracle out of his hat. Ron Howard, even after Splash and Cocoon, ain't these guys, yet. When he lets his film relax into hip facetiousness, and when Keaton parades his elfin jock swagger, Gung Ho is agreeable. But its relentless stereotyping of the Japanese provokes winces and worse. Its tone swings violently from pratfall to preachment, from an indictment of featherbed laziness to an extended beer-commercial celebration of the mythical American worker. Perhaps the brand of canny moral exuberance that Gung Ho finally...
Anticipating the gung-ho spirit of their spiritual successors in Silicon Valley, the ENIAC team members worked with demonic intensity. "Eckert was completely devoted to the machine," recalls John Grist Brainerd, the project director. "He would work on it day and night, and worry, worry." Two cots were installed on the ground floor of the Moore School so that the exhausted computer scientists could rest near their cherished machine. "When it finally turned on, everyone was elated," recalls Kay Mauchly. "It seemed like every day was a happy...
...Governor is commander in chief of the Texas National Guard, went down at the invitation of the Defense Department, which paid his way. "We've got our troops down here," he said. "We want to see how they're doing." Texas' participation, while generally popular in the gung-ho state, was criticized by some as politically motivated. White, a centrist Democrat not known for grandstanding, denied that he was boosting U.S. policy in the region. "I'm not trying to send any signals," he said, "except to support...
...characters with snatches of contemporaneous news footage. These black-and-white bulletins from the front trumpet the glory of the Empire in all its turbaned pomp, while providing hearty reports on wartime developments in the Asian theater. But the newsreels also serve a subtler purpose. Through their gung-ho descriptions of Gunga Din's descendants they present, unvarnished, Britain's official stance toward its colonies, a paternalism compounded of arrogance and affection...
...funnier. When Martin turned to feature films (with The Jerk in 1979), the challenge was to transfer the soul of this character, this smart dumb guy, into the svelte body of a comic-movie hero. It has not always been a snug fit. In Pennies from Heaven he was gung-ho but overwhelmed by the musical machinery; in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid he got lost in a clever construct of old movie clips. By the time The Man with Two Brains came out, Martin's stand-up audience had deserted him. A pity: they missed...