Word: martinisms
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Back in 2000, Steve Martin was talking about the hack writer's trick of getting sympathy for one character by making another one a total rotter. "I think that's the cheap and ugly way out," he said. "What I hate in movies - I mean action movies - is, 'We need the audience to really hate the bad guy. So let's have him kill two 6-year-olds...
...Martin was thinking too small. The current recipe, cooked up in last year's Death Race and this week's Law Abiding Citizen, is to have some malefactor slaughter the leading character's wife and child - the love of his life and his hope for the future - as he watches helplessly. After that, any transgression, including wholesale murder, is understandable. In real life, good men may try to gulp down the black bile of their devastation and move on. They would answer Bernard Shaw's question to the 1988 Democratic candidate for President - "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped...
...whose killer not only tracks down the lawyer who prosecuted him but terrorizes the man's wife and child. The movie's sobering climax - the lawyer refuses to kill the killer, because he will not be reduced, even in extremis, to his animal impulses - was rectified in the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake, where wily psychopath Robert De Niro dies several times. The same year, The Silence of the Lambs brought the genre its essential wrinkle of the evil genius, beating the criminal-justice system even as he bites its face...
...Bryan Martin had always wondered what it would be like to run his own business, but it wasn't until insurance giant Zurich opted to shut down its regional Indianapolis office where he sold insurance that he decided to turn his pipe dream into a reality...
...really boils down to this: all life is interrelated,” Frenk said Frenk, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King...