Word: odessa
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...Walk Home, at least, gets points for making the audience's white surrogate a woman and for giving equal emotional weight to the black woman who spurs her toward responsible action. In Montgomery in 1955, blacks are boycotting city buses until they are allowed to sit wherever they please. ! Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) must walk nine miles to her job as maid for the Thompson family. And Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek) must take a painful journey too, from the blinkered bourgeoisie to courageous solidarity with her sisters under the skin...
High school football is a quasi-religion all over the South, but in Odessa, Texas, it is more -- a mania, a frenzied obsession, a compensation, perhaps, for living in the wind-beaten, mesquite-covered, dust-ridden, sun-baked locale that novelist Larry McMurtry calls (in Texasville) "the worst town on earth." Odessans often fill every one of the 20,000 seats in the gleaming $6 million stadium, complete with two-story press box, built in 1982 for Permian High School's five-time state champions, the Panthers. Odessa's preoccupation with the Panthers is richly chronicled in Friday Night Lights...
...gods of poker are not impressed. Preston bumps a pair of queens, and the last $3,500 of his $10,000 stake, against what turns out to be a pair of kings. Now Slim is out of the action, and so is 83-year-old Johnny Moss of Odessa, Texas, a three-time champion with the smile of a crocodile. Earlier, Moss had said, "I like my chances better than anybody's. If a man can go high, I can go higher." Not this time...
...Soviet officers who have lived relatively well abroad are coming back to nothing," confirms a senior Western military attache in Moscow. Some soldiers are faring even worse; several thousand are reportedly living in tents in the Odessa area. A poll of army personnel taken last fall, even before the influx from Eastern Europe began, found that 91% considered their quality of life "almost unbearable." Such a mood, said Izvestia, was "creating a crisis in the army...
...expect some 21st century director to filch a scene from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these...