Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nancy Thompson was a modern Nancy Drew. And in Renny Harlin's Nightmare 4, Alice Johnson is Alice in Wonderland, falling through the hole of her consciousness into a war with the Mad Felt-Hatter. All the Nightmare films are compact encyclopedias of classical and pop allusions. They quote Poe and Cocteau, Hamlet and Balinese dream theory; they crib ruthlessly from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, Poltergeist and themselves. They are cultural carnivores...
...year-old physician, who eight years ago was made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth, has devoted much of her life to caring for the dying, and in doing so has changed the way of death for millions of people. Dame Cicely is England's modern-day Florence Nightingale. She has made herself death's interlocutor, bargaining away the pain and isolation in return for peace and acceptance. She has done this as much through the strength of a very forthright -- some say autocratic -- character as through good medicine. "Her spirit is not to be complacent," says...
...inspired by a gift from a dying patient and armed with an indomitable determination, Dame Cicely opened St. Christopher's, the world's first modern hospice. In doing so, she changed the impersonal, technocratic approach to death that since World War II has become endemic in overwhelmed Western hospitals. No heroic efforts were made to prolong life. There was no operating theater; no temperatures were taken or pulses recorded. Instead of specialists mumbling into charts, there were doctors sitting at bedsides holding patients' trembling hands. When death came, it was not with the accompaniment of IV drips and respirators...
Saunders did not invent the hospice. The Greeks probably originated the concept of a place to go to die before 1000 B.C. It has its modern roots in a home for the dying opened in Dublin in the late 19th century by an associate of Florence Nightingale's. Not long after, the Sisters of Charity opened a similar home in London. It was largely at that home, in the 1950s and 1960s, that Dame Cicely developed her ideas for a modern hospice that would bring physical and spiritual peace in the face of death. The end of life "can turn...
Mostly, though, they run in circles, aimlessly looking for trouble, just like a modern urban gang. That is not, however, an apt analogy. The film is basically a drag, and not helped by Christopher Cain's stand-around direction. And one's thirst for the clear, cool taste of traditional narrative -- motivated movement, defined antagonists, building suspense -- soon reaches maddening levels. A grownup could die in this wasteland...