Word: mob
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) runs a mob called the Wild Bunch; he looms over his lads with a vulture's hunched avidity, and his intimidating stare lasers right through his Ray-Bans. Lenny's been trying to close a real estate deal with one of the new kids on the block, a Russian tough named Uri (Karel Roden). But people keep stealing the multimillion-pound swag. The culprits happen to be a couple of Lenny's enforcers, One Two (Gerard Butler, of 300) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), working on tips One Two gets from Stella (Thandie Newton), a silky lawyer...
...Lenny considers himself less a thug than a commercial facilitator ("What d'you think we are? Gangsters?"), and Archie seconds that delusion. ("Keep your receipts," he tells one associate, "'cause this ain't the Mafia.") But the milieu is redolent of many a mob story, with the rocknrollas as goodfellas, and their hangouts as low-London franchises of the Ba-Da-Bing. The dialogue has an East End accent, but it's basically Tarantinian chatter - the joking among ruthless men with roguish rhetoric and short fuses - leavened for variety with the odd upmarket observation. "Beauty is a cruel mistress...
...most promising - young American director. He had a taste for American eccentrics, for the vagaries of life on the American road, and a talent that extended beyond fictional features to concert films and documentaries. In their day, Citizen's Band, Melvin and Howard, Something Wild and Married to the Mob had about them a sort of humane nuttiness, an ability to catch the fun and shrewdness of ordinary, if hard-pressed, folks without ever patronizing their goofiness. He was the most pleasure-loving and pleasure-giving of directors...
...Monday the House of Representatives saved us from the greedy fingers of Wall Street. Rather than surrender a single nickel of taxpayer money to the mob that gave us Alt-A mortgages, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit-default swaps, the House voted down the big bailout. Mr. Market was a very unhappy camper, dropping 777 points and change - or $1.2 trillion in market value. "This is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it, and I am not going to eat that cow patty," vowed Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia...
...derailed, Obama's more hands-off approach looked like a much smarter bet than McCain's all-in hand. But Obama may also now have some second thoughts about the virtues of national unity and citizen involvement. Sometimes it feels like democracy in action. Other times it feels like mob rule. The complexity of the problem and intricacy of the solution meant that the public response was more emotional than anything else. In a leadership vacuum, we got irrational belligerence, a desire to punish the greedheads that will take its broadest toll on the victims, not the perps...