Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With Reagan at the helm, many other influential Republicans are afraid to stand up for civil rights. Republican Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole has a civil rights record so solid that it won praise from Coretta Scott King. But when Reagan and the Moral Majority lobbied against the Civil Rights Restoration Act, Dole fled to Wisconsin in a futile attempt to attract voters and dodge the issue...
With this film, Itami is less a knockabout ironist, more a sly cinematic Dostoyevsky. The clues to this secret identity lie in his sudden alternations of mood between quiet and noisy desperation, his fascination with the moral force of the holy fool -- the part the director's graceful wife Miyamoto is essentially playing -- and, above all, his allusions to Crime and Punishment. As in the great novel, it is a tenacious detective's patience that forces the final confession a criminal requires for his soul's peace. But the entertaining dexterity with which Itami plays this potentially heavy hand...
What is troubling in his work is a moral ambiguity that verges on cynicism, coupled with a high-minded tone that verges on sanctimony. In The Untouchables he claimed the authority of history to invent a fictitiously murderous Eliot Ness and, worse, a guilty plea made for Al Capone by his attorney against the mobster's will. That is something that could not happen in any court still observing the fundamentals of the Constitution. In Speed-the-Plow Mamet makes the unastonishing revelation that movie moguls are venal and pandering. Perhaps he means to prick spectators' consciences by holding them...
STILL, we get atomized by giving too much importance to the peculiarities of others. Minor personal characteristics may be quite important aesthetically--you couldn't have a description without the details--but surely they overstep their purpose when they become a basis for moral judgement. Instead of looking at people, we often sniff out characteristics, representatives of certain stereotypes (usually bad ones...
...immoral investment policies in South Africa, then we should say so and not accept the statement that the senior class gift is apolitical. Warren's announcement that the senior class gift is "apolitical" is too simple a construction of the world. People try to remove many actions from a moral framework by stripping them of their political significance. Unfortunately, the world we live in is fraught with more painful moral dilemmas...