Word: moralizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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High school grads Alice (Claire Danes) and Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) lark off to Thailand, where they get framed on a heroin rap. The dank, formulaic script allows few of the moral ambiguities of 1998's Return to Paradise (there the country was Malaysia, and the American prisoner sort of guilty). The tale also has little of the pulpy juice of the B-movies Kaplan made in the '70s. The only guilty pleasure is watching Danes' wildly noble emoting. Her tears are as strong as a porn queen's orgasm...
Thus life hobbles on in a still bleeding, often broken country in which every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself lost in a lightless labyrinth of sorts, in which every path leads to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. Last year Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in for a while to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer...
...have it both ways: they're reducing the burden of government (unlike liberals), and they're addressing society's problems (unlike traditional conservatives). It's certainly wonderful to be told, as a voter, that you can show your concern about the nation's have-nots, about the nation's moral values and so on by accepting a tax cut. But government-by-tax-credit is still government. It's "letting people keep more of their own hard-earned money," as the pols like to say, but only if they do what the government wants...
Which may be just what we want to hear. In essence, these shows say about the famous what soap operas say about the rich--that they're no better than we are, probably less happy, possibly less moral. Audiences today have a love-to-hate relationship with Hollywood and the media; we've supported Beavis and Butt-head's meta-media sarcasm and David Letterman's roasting of TV bigs. It's a short step from a late-night joke about CBS chief Les Moonves to the name dropping that has become easy punch-line fodder on even bland fare...
...that the movie is most significantly a satire of an essentially self-satirizing genre (though it is entirely hip in its cross-references). Rather, it uses the archetypes of its time to impart a certain moral and melodramatic force to its story. Its kid hero, Hogarth, is full of bounce and bravery; the car-gnawing, train-wrecking giant is enthusiastically educable in his genially klutzy way. But the largest fun lies in the other characters: jut-jawed Kent Mansley, the funny-dumb government agent who has bought into the whole duck-and-cover thing; Dean, the beatnik junk sculptor whose...