Word: kidding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...kid ourselves," Jeffrey L. Elman '69 said in reply. "Harvard is teaching these things as a part of a military program; the ROTC will have to stand or fall on its military value...
What the black kid then replies to the white boy's mea culpa is a striking example of false consciousness. "We're all in the same bag," he says, "We've all been kicked out. Let's face it, this job is the first time we've ever belonged to anything...
SEVERAL other bits are like that. The white kid says a suspect must be rich because he has an eight thousand dollar car, and the black kid (picked up in the Watts riot, you remember), replies, "May-be he's not rich. I know a cat on welfare who has a bigger car." The remark might come from a militant consciousness akin to Malcolm X's when he called welfare emasculating, but considering that the black boy is working for the police, it probably is just as absurd, vicious, and ugly as it seems...
...part that perhaps hits closest to home for most viewers is when the rich white kid tells about his past. He admits in a teary and impassioned speech that he hadn't left home voluntarily at all, but had been thrown out by his parents. "I was obnoxious. I shot down everything they tried to do for me. I wasn't just anti-establishment but anti-everything. I was kicked...
...calls them invariably involve some lovable folk; who pull off an enormous and improbable heist, only to be foiled in the last reel by a freakish turn of fate. Disaster can come in many forms: a runaway poodle (The Killing), a cremated coffin (Ocean's 11), or a kid with a photographic memory (The League of Gentlemen). At their best, caper movies can be wry little existential parables; at their worst, they are merely two hours of closeups on nervous thieves and unyielding safe dials...