Word: mad
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Budnitz is at her best when dwelling in this fantastic reality, but only when her issues stick to the very personal. “Preparedness” tells the absurd story of a gun-totin’ American president who issues a false alarm of mutual assured destruction (MAD) and is horrified to see citizens doing anything but taking cover, instead fulfilling their long-latent fantasies. The story catalogs beautiful glimpses of life in an Edenic state of anticipated death, recurring with each subsequent government MAD “fire drill.” But the scenes of the president...
...this third film in the Mad Max cycle had stopped there, it might have been some kind of low, visionary masterpiece. But "beyond Thunderdome" lies only preacherly anticlimax. Cast out into the wilderness for failing to live up to Barter-town's dog-eat-dog code, Max is rescued by a tribe of lost children as the savior their mythology has promised them. When the talk drags, he leads them on a crusade of the innocents against Aunty and her crowd...
Their final confrontation, a running vehicular battle, is spectacular enough, but it traverses terrain that George Miller and the rest of Max's creators have fully charted before. Once again, as they did in The Road Warrior, they have flirted with greatness. The question that remains for Mad Max IV to answer is, Can they embrace it? And not go all solemn when they do? --By Richard Schickel
...Second, the U.S. should alter its basic weapons strategy from targeting populations to a counterforce capability. That goes against those who support the idea of mutual assured destruction as a deterrent. But I think MAD is obsolete. What American President is going to risk New York and Chicago to save Berlin? As I look back on World War II and on the war in the Pacific, I think the whole concept of targeting civilian populations was morally wrong. In World War I, there were 16 million deaths. In World War II, there were 55 million. Much of the difference...
...Bomb-crazy Dr. Strangelove's right arm, which goes its own way, fondly recalls the doctor's Nazi days and at one point attempts to strangle its "master." Commercially, if not critically, The Birds was the more successful of the two films, even though the character of the mad nuclear scientist (always suspect) became a permanent part of national folklore. Still, it seemed that we were not quite ready for so relentless a contemplation of nuclear disaster, especially one that began with the onscreen demurrer, "It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent...