Word: lifeless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...schoolgirl "pear-shaped." When Duke finds out, he locks his son alone with him in the bedroom, strips him and beats him senseless with his razor strop (a prized possession incidentally, one of Duke's "glittering things"). When the punishment is sufficiently administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least. Don't be like that." Later he fakes a suicide while his son watches. In the light of these episodes, Geoffrey Wolff's greatest achievement is not that he managed to write such a balanced account of his upbringing...
...Since the movie's generally good actors (among them Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Sigourney Weaver) all play equally bland technicians, it is hard to make an emotional investment in the alien's pecking order. Indeed, the film's characters are so lifeless that one begins to wonder whether they might not be parodies of space-age bureaucrats. If so, the satire is far too flat to be its own reward...
...Scattered reports indicate that people are dying (mostly at the hands of the 10,000 member American-trained Guard) at the rate of five or six per day. The victims range from the scores of young men who have been picked up by the Guard only to turn up lifeless on some roadside the next morning, to the five children who tried two weeks ago to stage a hunger strike in support of the opposition to General Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the President and dictator, to the guy from Cedar Rapids who taught at the American school in Managua...
...status of O'Hara himself is uncertain, after his mysteriously lifeless eighth place finish in the 500 free on Thursday and his personal disappointment at the pair of low 1:40's that he turned in last night while taking fourth in the 200 free and leading off Princeton's ill-fated 800 free relay...
...Great Train Robbery is one of the most cynical "pure escapist" movies ever made. Crichton hasn't even bothered to conceal his disgust for his lifeless hackwork. He crams his screenplay with adventure-movie cliches, but he doesn't poke fun at them; he piles them on as if to show how much he can get away with. Movies like this aren't very entertaining if they're not stylish or suspenseful; Crichton's stupid, stilted dialogue precludes style; the Mission: Impossible predictability, sluggish editing, and surprising number of loose ends strangle suspense. Characters inexplicably appear and disappear--dragged...