Word: mercilessness
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This whitewashing of America was partly accomplished by the purge of President Nixon during the Watergate "farce," Chomsky argues. Instead of prosecuting Nixon for his "serious crimes--the merciless bombings of Laos and Cambodia and the murderous 'pacification' campaigns in South Vietnam..." Americans chased their President from office in the name of morality, charging him with committing what Chomsky calls "petty criminality...
...film's major hangup is its confused characterization of evil. The devil (David Warner a la Ming the Merciless) tries to encompass all evil but fails to conjure anything but pity for his campy lines. Margaret Hamilton's witch in Oz terrified children of all ages; she never diluted her rottenness. Yet Gilliam has exorcised the seriousness out of where it belongs and makes the devil and his cohorts buffoons, wearing garbage bags over their capes and muttering things about advanced technology. Gilliam intends the plastic and electronics, which were also prominent in Kevin's living room, to personify evil...
...addition to wagon congestion on market day, there was one other overriding problem, and that was dragons. Predictably merciless when they terrorized a village--as was their occasional wont--dragons became much more unpleasant when pestered by heroes with long spears. One such confrontation is depicted in Matthew Robbins' Dragonslayer, the story of a kid who wears burlap clothing but makes good anyway...
...candor. His brother Billy was cheerfully posing for snapshots at the gas pump, permanent beer can ominously poised. Even the President-elect and his wife were visible, making occasional forays to greet childhood friends or to eat at the nearest restaurants-every forkful watched for significance by a merciless post-Watergate press corps. A sizable slice of the citizenry willingly guided the influx of strangers round the sites-Jimmy's birthplace, his country home, his father's simple grave. (The ambitious monuments in the cemetery are not marked CARTER, however, but WISE and FAUST...
...actors, one imagines, needed very little help at all, beyond the occasional suggestion to play broadly. As usual, Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo, is bent on destroying the earth and, failing that, making life as unpleasant as possible for Flash (Sam J. Jones), his girlfriend Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) and his pal Dr. Zarkov (Topol). The results of this obsession are colorful: large and small battles, peril to Dale's virtue ("Prepare her for my pleasure," intones Ming at one point), sundry bondage fantasies. The high points are a whip fight staged on a wildly tilting platform...