Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shot down, the Korean airliner was only 11 or 12 miles-a mere 90 seconds or so-from international airspace, and the Soviet planes were low on fuel. The Soviets' main consideration at that point may have been to avoid letting it escape. A mixture of paranoia and bureaucratic rigidity makes the Soviets extremely sensitive about their territory. They have long feared encirclement by hostile forces. Any invasion of airspace, even inadvertent, is regarded by them as hostile...
...cheers, then, for Strange Invaders, a fond burlesque of alien-visitors movies of the 1950s. Indeed, its story begins in that Eisenhower decade of blandness and paranoia. A spaceship full of E.T.s has come to earth on a 25-year leash; now time is up and, just before the aliens leave, some humans are getting nosy. Which are the victims, which the villains? Hard to tell, since the reptilian aliens have assumed human form - except that they dress, speak and act as if it were still 1958 and they were all featured players on Father Knows Best...
...little compendium of spacy teen-age confusions; one minute she is watching porn tapes, the next she is trying to catch falling snowflakes on her tongue. Michael Leeson, who wrote scripts for the TV series Taxi, uses that show's mixture of urban gallantry and paranoia in his first feature. He has given Williams his best chance to vent his singular, hysterical style in a movie and provided Matthau, stooped and shuffling under the burden of his sanity, with his richest part in years. The film's moral is spoken by Donald's fiancée. Eyeing...
...hopes that by now John Badham is cooling his jets in some pleasant place where the dress code calls for swimsuits instead of straitjackets. For the director has obviously suffered a close encounter with paranoia in the past year or so. First of all, visions of the military-industrial complex seem to have caused a humongous helicopter to hover over his head. Loaded to the rotor blades with heavy artillery and the latest in supersnooping devices, the whirling bird is intended to attack such segments of the U.S. civilian population as happen to get unruly-though in these placid times...
...purge against the Communist Party and Soviet diplomats is further evidence of the paranoia that afflicts the Khomeini regime. Ardeshir Asgari, a defected Islamic Guard now living in Spain, maintains that Iran is haunted by internecine savagery and ubiquitous suspicion. The mullahs, he notes, "encourage officers to spy on one another," while forming special squads to eliminate officials suspected of harboring anti-Khomeini sympathies. Moreover, says Asgari, the Khomeini regime is terrified of the Mujahedin guerrillas. Often, he reports, his colleagues would gun down suspected dissidents in the streets, only to discover too late that they were unarmed and apolitical...