Word: idealisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that the family's troubles are so terrible; it is that they are so terribly typical. Eldest son Gil (Steve Martin) is a perfectionist who wants to be the ideal husband, father, provider and Little League manager that Frank never was. Gil's wise and patient wife (Mary Steenburgen) can deal with the pressure his anxious idealism generates, but his eight-year-old son cannot. The boy's school is insisting that special education is his only hope. His ball team is down on him because he keeps muffing easy pop-ups. Which, of course, makes Gil try even more...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
...false ideal of tolerance has not only outlawed censorship but discouraged censoriousness (another word for censure). Most civilizations have expressed their moral values by mobilization of social opprobrium. That, rather than specific legislation, is what changed the treatment of minorities in films and TV over recent years. One can now draw opprobrious attention by gay bashing, as the Beastie Boys rock group found when their distributor told them to cut out remarks about "fags" for business reasons. Or by anti-Semitism, as the just disbanded rap group Public Enemy has discovered...
...Kremlin was plainly alarmed that the strikes were eroding the party's control. Since the 1930s, no one had personified the state's ideal Soviet worker better than the propaganda hero Alexei Stakhanov, the coal miner who reputedly produced 14 times the daily norm. But there were no Stakhanovites in the Soviet Union's biggest coalfields last week. Wildcat strikes by more than 300,000 workers paralyzed some 250 mines and factories in the Kuzbass and Donbass basins, resulting in a 6 million-ton loss of production. The walkout spread as far as the coalpits in Vorkuta...
They were one of those New England couples who head "anywhere but here" and leave their homes to fortunate housesitters like myself. Ideal in theory, housesitting can have some unexpected downfalls, leaving me with the ultimate question: is a rent-free summer really worth all this...