Word: heros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...centennial of Edison's great achievement comes at a time when American innovative genius, so well personified by Edison, has begun to fade. The nation that produced Robert Fulton, Robert Goddard, Edmund Land and many others now has far fewer folk-hero tinkerers. Laments James G. Cook, president of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation: "Over the past decade, America has been losing its traditional leadership in technological innovation. Our Edison-like spirit of inventiveness seems to be going the way of the gas lamp...
...sort of hero. A millionaire who often lived like a bum, sleeping in a closet with his clothes on-because he believed that taking them off promoted insomnia-and spitting on the floor even in his cherished laboratories. A picturesque swearer who hired assistants whom George Bernard Shaw called "sensitive, cheerful and profane; liars, braggarts and hustlers." A would-be tycoon so crotchety and bullheaded that he could give little credit to the ideas of others; so inept in business matters that he lost control of the immensely profitable companies he founded. An incurable show-off and self-promoter...
...police state seem appealing. The judges are all psychotic or perverts or worse; the lawyers are all self-serving hypocrites; the cops all regard suspects as "scum." When criminals go to jail-usually on trumped-up charges-they invariably get murdered shortly after incarceration. Indeed, if the American hero of Midnight Express had come from Baltimore, there would have been no reason for him to escape the Turkish prison and return home...
...scenes, broad comic bits and mournful monologues are so indiscriminately mixed that the audience often does not know how to respond. At one point the movie comes to a halt so that we can go on a supposedly comic helicopter ride. There are also pointless interludes in which the hero visits his humorless grandfather (Lee Strasberg) at an old-age home; these scenes swing wildly between sentimental clichés and tasteless jokes about senility...
...aging mentor, newly popular short story writer E.I. Lonoff, whom he has never met. Here he embarks on an intellectual journey to discover both the mystery behind Lonoff's ghost-like absence from the "real world" and the secret to Lonoff's uncanny ability to characterize the Jewish anti-hero in his stories. Along the way, Nathan encounters Hope, Lonoff's lonely, bitter and jealous wife, and the enchanting Amy Bellette, his precocious and loving student...