Word: hammerism
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...example, that during interrogations at police headquarters, suspects were routinely handcuffed to metal chairs, questioned for as long as 24 hours and often beaten. The officers sometimes were careful to leave no bruises: one technique was to cushion a suspect's head with a phone book and hammer it with a heavy object. But on other occasions, the newspaper reported, officers beat suspects with lead pipes, blackjacks, brass knuckles, handcuffs, chairs and table legs. At times, other suspects were forced to watch the beatings through one-way windows and told by officers that they would get the same treatment...
...bills and backaches rather than on Telemann partitas. With no investment in a ticket, they find it easiest to review a performance with their feet: they keep on walking. Hence a by-God spontaneous response is the street musicians' sweetest reward. A Seattle group called Brandywine (violin, hammer dulcimer, guitar, bass) will always cherish the moment during the Fat Tuesday celebration when its galloping rendition of the William Tell Overture so inflamed a woman bystander that she bounded up onto a horse behind a mounted policeman. Hi-ho, Rossini...
Just as Fellini gives us a German conductor-cum-dictator to hammer home his message, so he creates his supposedly symbolic revolution out of such literal-minded devices as graffiti, falling plaster and gunshots. Certainly the movie's point comes through loud and clear, but, as art, Orchestra Rehearsal is distressingly tone-deaf...
...vote goes to Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer films and one independent production. Lee is not a very good actor--he's usually much too stiff and rather boring--but something in Dracula tapped the best of him. True, it was an impersonal vampire, a far cry from Langella's more complex lover. But Bram Stoker's Dracula is not much of human being, either. Lee was such a commanding Dracula, statuesque and solemn but with tremendous reserves of strength, capable of exploding at any given instant into blazing, hellish fury. Yet he was also capable...
This is the expensive Dracula that the gang at Hammer films must have dreamed of making back in the '50s and '60s. The legend had fallen out of general favor back then, and only B-picture makers and their fans still cared about the ineffable Transylvanian count and the strange folkloristic ways of fighting off his baleful influence (garlic on the windowsills, stakes through the heart, that sort of nonsense). Like those old programmers, the new Dracula is shot in the high gothic-romantic tradition, lushly scored and terribly serious about itself and its subject matter...