Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rose on Omaha, Neb., last Tuesday morning, 42 traders confabbed on the floor of the brokerage firm Ameritrade, ready for battle. By the end of that grueling day, the top broker had executed a heroic 442 trades. Nice work, but nothing compared with the action in the next room. There, a rack of workstations had calmly processed 3,600 orders, all placed over the Internet. And that was in the first hour of trading...
...guys...well, thank God for the good old FBI. The federal agents dispatched to handle the situation are portrayed as soulless automatons, and the local sheriff they corrupt into doing their nefarious bidding is almost as dim-witted as Baily (despite heroic efforts at subtlety by Silence of The Lambs's Ted Levine). Costa-Gavras insists that the FBI are simply caught up in the hubbub, trying to do their job as best they can; but when he depicts Bureau snipers blowing away a wax statue of a Native American in a botched attempt to nail Baily, one starts...
...achievement of Ken Burns' that his latest documentary for PBS helps rescue two heroic figures from the limbo of sixth-grade history. (Undaunted Courage, the recent bestseller by Stephen Ambrose, had already begun their rehabilitation, and Ambrose appears in the film.) Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, which will be shown in two-hour segments on Nov. 4 and 5, smoothly relates the story of the first expedition to cross the West and reach the Pacific Ocean. The familiar Burns techniques are here--actors reading letters, a cast of commentators, panning shots of historical images--but they...
...faint of stomach. (When the song The Hammer of Love starts playing, go out for popcorn.) But like the 1994 Crumb, this deadpan documentary transcends its sensational topic. Flanagan's artful self-mutilation, and especially his corrosively comic descriptions of it, amounted to a heroic decision to take the punishment that God or nature meted out to him into his own hands...
There is something heroic in this domestic image. Alone in the dark, facing his fears, the modern-day parent is a rugged individual of a new sort. We would be wrong to think of this sort of person as an unreflective suburbanite, locked into pre-fab group-think. While we may not ride out into the sunset alone anymore, there is a contemporary heroic individualism that deserves our respect...