Word: macguffin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With its primitive action premise (a sacred MacGuffin has been stolen; you go get it back), Ong-Bak needs the things Jaa can add. And there are plenty. As Ting, a country-boy studying to be a monk who has been taught Muay Thai martial arts and goes to Bangkok to retrieve a missing Buddha head, Jaa battles a series of Asian and Caucasian bruisers with fists, feet, elbows, head--he uses them all in his full-body barrage--with a sleek intensity and jaw-swiveling impact unique in movie martial arts. He also knows how to take a fall...
...York Times hard-cover fiction best-seller list, is one of those hypercaffeinated conspiracy specials with two-page chapters and people's hair described as "burgundy." But Brown, who by book's end has woven Magdalene intricately and rather outrageously into his plot, has picked his MacGuffin cannily. Not only has he enlisted one of the few New Testament personages whom a reader might arguably imagine in a bathing suit (generations of Old Masters, after all, painted her topless). He has chosen a character whose actual identity is in play, both in theology and pop culture...
Alfred Hitchcock's films employ what the director called the MacGuffin--the object around which the plot seems to revolve. In the Thomas White Affair, the MacGuffin is the Crusader, an $11 billion piece of artillery that the Army long championed--until Rumsfeld axed the program last week. The tanklike Crusader has been in trouble for years, though that didn't keep the Army from fighting for it right up to the end. Rumsfeld had been thinking of killing it for months, but when he learned that Army officers had gone behind his back to try to save the program...
...Lamour was around in the first six "Road" movies, but her function was what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin - the trigger to the plot, the prize that Bing usually won from Bob. Women had to be in Crosby movies, the way songs and a standard-issue villain did. But these were jut narrative conventions. Bing was, if not a man's man, a guy's guy; women were ornaments to his self-esteem but not central to it. "In a lifetime of tears and laughter," he declaims with trembling sonority in "Rio," "it has been my discovery that friendship between...