Word: numbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PAULINE KAEL called it "the cattleprod," the theory being that today's audiences are so numb from perennial TV that a movie in a theater needs a long blunt instrument wired with several hundred volts and applied to an armpit, perhaps, or some appropriate erogenous zone, in order to elicit the merest twitch of a response...
...much of his life Herzl was strangely numb to evidences of antiSemitism. The Zionistic notion was merely an unworked plot until the Dreyfus trial. Then, as Paris correspondent for a Viennese paper, Herzl suddenly saw that the defendant was emblematic of his people. Captain Dreyfus might assume the insignia, the language, the official role, but in the end he would be betrayed and reviled. Dreyfusards marched in an honorable cause, wrote the young Herzl, but one "which-let us not delude ourselves-is a lost...
...this: who in LaJolla or Orange County or Pasadena plays hoop on a makeshift. peach-basket-and-dirt court behind a shotgun house? Who in sunny California dribbles his digits numb in snow, rain, gravel and mud, day in, day out, religiously, every day of the year...
Only an alchemist can save her. Dobecker interrupts his peacefully numb existence as a low official and his dabbling in mystical sciences when he briefly wins Tockbridge, and suddenly finds himself on film 24. Torn between fascination with her and concern for himself, he slips easily into the world of satanism and grave-robbing, where his familiarity with the occult keeps him in good standing. He eventually bugs the lawyer's confessional and saves Tockbridge's future--that's a happy ending in Washington these days. Having failed to find his philosopher's stone in either politics or his alchemical...
...movie is set in Montreal from the late 1940s onward into the first pale years of the '50s. Buddy's father (Jack Warden) is a taxi driver. His brother is a pre-med student practically numb with the wish to be a WASP, to let the Jewishness drain out of him and get a life-supporting transfusion of blue blood. Buddy, just out of high school, works in a summer resort, tries running a roulette game on the sly, is hoodwinked into smuggling heroin for a fat-fingered hood, concocts on his own all sorts of wild-eyed...