Word: inert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...adaptations of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's intricate, instructive novel of sexual gamesmanship among the 18th century French aristocracy. For Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere, while fiddling with the plot of this deliciously nasty tale, have studiously embalmed its spirit. Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures...
...Senator to stop raking over dead horses"; "What did the President know, and does he have any idea that he knew it?" The lesson of recent scandals is both less and more alarming. If the bums are not thrown out, it is because an overly forgiving, or morally inert, American people allows them to stay...
...desire for "virgin" and/or "whore," but objectification in either case, leaving no roon for normal, healthy sexual response on the part of the woman. Thus the dorm from which Jenny emerges, demonstratively glad to see Ollie, is the "Best Little Whorehouse in Radcliffe," while a shot of her inert body in the hospital elicits the derogation "typical Harvard woman...
...tactic of the rescuers, consciously drawn from the nonviolent techniques of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., is to knead themselves so densely in around the doors that no one can thread a way through the inert resisting bodies. Rescuers are not supposed to push or shove, and they are told not to bring poster sticks or umbrellas that they might be tempted to use as barriers. If the mass is penetrated, it is supposed to ooze back out and around the rift, enclosing it in a new carapace of seated bodies. They move in a human sludge, on their...
...real forces of revolution were anger, frustration -- and demography. In the U.S., rage focused on the impersonal machinery of a military adventure that the post-World War II generation did not support and that few seemed capable of affecting. Rage also targeted an inert political system, manned by the middle-aged, that ringed its conventions with police, ignored the clamor to halt the war, and failed to heed the smoke rising from the ghettoes. In France, anger was directed first at a sclerotic university system, then at the Fifth Republic, which condoned it, then at the Republic's architect...