Word: heartlessness
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...responsibility to protect the common good to produce an almost total preoccupation with the bottom line. The networks are struggling to survive. And like most businesses in that situation, they make only what they feel the public will buy. And that, the statistics seem to indicate, is mindless, heartless, escapist fare. If we are dissatisfied with the moral content of what we are invited to watch, I think we should begin by examining our own consciences. When we tune in, are we ready to plunge into reality, so as to extract its meaning, or are we hoping to escape into...
...case -- "courtly and windblown and stoic" -- but in his 36 years he has been a major-league ballplayer, a New Orleans prosecutor and the foreign editor of an important New York City newspaper. What story there is gradually reveals the couple's past affair and tells why a heartless decision made five years earlier blights any chance for happiness...
They are joined by a motley crew of transvestites, transsexuals, presidential candidates (George Bush and "Some Tired Old Liberal"), heartless right to lifers, leather clad feminists and a bevy of other ingratiating characters (35 in totem), all played by a very versatile 12 member ensemble...
...movie makes knowing fun of all sorts of Hollywood types, but the satire never seems heartless. "Everything that's in there that's mean is about me," Altman says. "I mean, I talk like those guys. I get on the phone and I make those pitches the same way. I cannot tell you how many times I've said ((about a proposed film)), 'Well, it's kind of like Nashville, it's a Nashville kind of structure.' The film does not escape its own satire. We didn't let anybody off the hook...
...real problems with the film lie elsewhere: in the chilly, self-conscious sleekness of its production design, in the heartless and relentless thrill seeking of Paul Verhoeven's direction, in the too intricate, not entirely persuasive plotting required to create an alternate suspect, a police psychiatrist (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who truly loves Douglas. Finally, the film breaks faith with the most inviolable convention of the whodunit -- refusing to state firmly which of the two women dunit (notwithstanding gay activists' confident naming of one of them, in a publicity campaign aimed at undermining the movie). This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance...