Word: machinas
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...hostages-mostly Israeli-at Uganda's Entebbe Airport. Now, with time rapidly slipping away and the deadline merely hours off, death seemed ever more certain for the terrified captives. Then suddenly, in what in a different age would have been called the act of a deus ex machina, three Israeli C-130 Hercules transports, guns flaring, appeared in the dark sky over the airport. Soon they touched down, disgorging about 100 paratroopers and infantrymen and powerful armored personnel carriers...
...that bargain is in effect the unintended heritage of the Xerox machine. Since its perfection less than two decades ago, the green-eyed deus ex machina has helped alter the course of history and changed forever the daily rhythms of white-collar life. The photocopier has, its detractors say, fostered waste, encouraged sloth, stifled creativity and punched holes in the copyright laws. Bureaucrats complain that the machine now makes confidential exchanges all but impossible; foes of official secrecy complain that fear of Xerox-abetted leaks has made bureaucrats more secretive than ever. Whatever the complaint, in view of the social...
...doing its job in this film, and ther heroes--Redford and Max von Sydow (the completely amoral killer-as-artist)--are hollow and unconvincing. Three Days of the Condor illustrates some of the dilemmas of liberalism faced with the need for a C.I.A.--the final appeal, the deus ex machina of the film, is The New York Times. The C.I.A. comes off as sane and well-organized, in contrast to the radical, destructive individualism of both Redford and von Sydow. The acting of course is wooden and the fight scenes amatuerish and unbelievable. There is some good fancy footwork...
...When temperature and drugs had been ruled out and there were no signs after 30 minutes that the brain was working, it was decided that a patient had indeed suffered brain death. Of 459 such patients, none recovered despite the efforts of their physicians. "It's life ex machina," says Boshes. "At that point, the only thing keeping anything alive is the respirator; the brain itself is irrevocably dead...
Casablanca [1942]. What can you say that's new about Bogey, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Claude Rains, except maybe that Rains is actually a deus ex machina at the end and that you should read the short story, "Sodom and Gomorrah," by Richard Berczeller in the October 14 issue of the New Yorker about Michael Curtiz, the film's director...