Word: midnight
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...retinue out into the Primorskian night where it was 10 degrees F and snowing hard. Bill Hyland, then a Ford aide and now editor of Foreign Affairs, chuckled inwardly at the bizarre spectacle of some of the world's most powerful men walking in a strange courtyard at midnight, befurred heads together like so many frozen caterpillars, clouds of steam rising from their whispers about throwweights and MIRVs...
Magadan. It is a name that turns Soviet hearts to ice and evokes memories of the long ago midnight knock on the door. The port of entry to the most deadly archipelago of the Gulag system, it became a synonym for the terror Joseph Stalin visited upon the land. At least 2 million prisoners were worked to death in its gold mines and timber forests and on its road projects. Since then, with few exceptions, the city of Magadan and the vast region around it have been closed to foreigners. When the Soviets permitted a small group to visit Magadan...
...Michael Moriarty, Jeffrey Jones and Paul Le Mat, and he does well with the bitter ironies implicit in visits to the prison by celebrity peace delegations. But at best he generates only a distant compassion for his subjects. The kind of vivid identification that a film like Midnight Express created eludes him. Still, if American POWs deserve in the end a higher art than Chetwynd commands, they are at least entitled to the respect he accords their heroism...
...latest foreign observer to peer into the void is Salman Rushdie, author of two fantastical novels, Midnight's Children and Shame, that tell the recent history of India and Pakistan. As an Indian who grew up with his independent motherland in its infancy, and as a fabulist whose bravura acts of invention bring to mind the "magic realism" of Latin American fiction, Rushdie felt himself obscurely allied with the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. Last summer he accepted the invitation of the Sandinista leadership to inspect the seven-year-old revolution. For three weeks he attended rallies, journeyed to the Honduran...
...passive experience: the audience doesn't come along for the ride, physically or emotionally. After opening moments of real wonder, the dramatic tension depends increasingly on what tricks the set can do next: opening the floor to send up a concealed bedroom or judging stand; filling the midnight sky with stars that sketch a celestial madonna in a surge of unexamined theological kitsch. Against this whizbangery, the actors make scant impression, although Robert Torti is an oily villain and Greg Mowry a winsome underdog. Andrew Lloyd Webber's pastiche of American pop offers histrionic passages but no memorable tunes. Worse...