Word: heroicizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust...
More power, then, to John Sayles for insisting on the continuing relevance of the scandal and for bringing it to the screen despite the narrative problems it presents. These include lack of a heroic central figure; hard-to- dramatize subtleties in the relationships between teammates (and between players and their cheap owner, Charles Comiskey) that ripened some of them for corruption; the fact that the ballplayers were legally exonerated yet exiled from the game by a commissioner hastily recruited to spruce up baseball's image...
TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1947 "car of tomorrow...
...gift from a dying patient and armed with an indomitable determination, Dame Cicely opened St. Christopher's, the world's first modern hospice. In doing so, she changed the impersonal, technocratic approach to death that since World War II has become endemic in overwhelmed Western hospitals. No heroic efforts were made to prolong life. There was no operating theater; no temperatures were taken or pulses recorded. Instead of specialists mumbling into charts, there were doctors sitting at bedsides holding patients' trembling hands. When death came, it was not with the accompaniment of IV drips and respirators but with tranquil normality...
TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1948 "car of tomorrow." Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau front a splendid cast...