Word: ironic
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...just me - I mean, me and my infallible film sense - or are action movies getting better while nearly every other genre has gone fallow and flaccid? I'm no special fan of cine-mayhem, but I'm buoyed by the craft and verve of recent entertainments like Iron Man, Speed Racer, Wanted, Hellboy and The Dark Knight. Even so-so entries like The Incredible Hulk and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Billionaire Sexagenarians Trying to Recapture the Glories of Their Middle Years interrupt their meandering with set pieces that are figuratively or literally dynamite - like an old Astaire...
Motorpsycho Nightmare It's 2012, we're told at the start. The U.S. economy has collapsed. Prisons have been privatized. The government rules with an iron fist, and the populace is sedated with violent entertainment. (Wait, this isn't futurism; it's a Daily Kos blog.) On a nouveau Alcatraz called Terminal Island, Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen, merging her purse-lipped Pat Nixon impersonation with the imperious tenseness of Dick Nixon in late-Watergate mode) is in charge of an annual televised car-nage held on a giant track within the prison. In this Death Race, lifers drive the souped...
...Designed by Joseph Bazalgette, 19th century creator of the London sewage system, the Crossness Engines House waste-water pumping station is a feat of Victorian engineering. Inside is a rare marriage of brute power and beauty: four of the world's largest rotative beam engines, surrounded by ornate cast-iron work that has been carefully restored to stunning effect...
...attract the highest-paying guests. We have the frame; now we want to fill it with a beautiful picture." The development at Tivat is the centerpiece of these ambitions. The plan includes an 800-berth marina, a golf course, a resort village and several hotels. Where an old corrugated-iron warehouse stood, the Four Seasons is building its first resort on the Mediterranean, to open...
...dinner guests from China's business and government establishments, led by 70 year old Wu Yi, China's "Iron Lady", were a bit younger, but not by much. They may run the country's huge state owned companies and the government that minds them, but in a China dominated by the Communist Party, leadership is chosen, and replaced, by generation. The diners at the Jianfu Palace were smart, and like Madame Wu, as tough as can be, but they are conservative, and they do things by the book. Dinner was served by scores of waitresses clad in qipao. The guests...