Word: patriotism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Enya, U2 and Sinead O'Connor, singing elegies to the millennium. Now comes the Irish quartet CLANNAD (whose lead singer, Maire Brennan, is Enya's sister) and an album, Anam, that has all the right career moves: a duet with U2's Bono, a song from the hit movie Patriot Games. The group merits a listen. Brennan's soprano keenings, in English and Gaelic, are variously backed by cool, Sergio Mendes-style harmonies, a bluesy sax, and a guitar's banshee wailing. But in the tune Harry's Game, Clannad goes spare and liturgical, transmuting New Age tonal banality into...
These ideas are mild compared with those Robb expressed in the past. Before remaking his image, he castigated blacks and Jews, embraced Hitler and endorsed killing homosexuals, calling for "the death penalty to the faggot slime." His newspapers (the Torch and White Patriot) have featured racial slurs including a cartoon showing a hanging of a black man and a bigoted ditty, The Negro National Anthem. Despite his toned-down persona, he still hawks copies of Mein Kampf and swears the Holocaust is a hoax...
...danger is missing. Genres that vitalized the box office a decade ago -- the sci-fi epic, the horror movie, the adult comedy -- look sapped. Top directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese remake their own or other people's movies. So does everybody else. Lethal Weapon 3 and Patriot Games and Sister Act may bring millions into a cool theater on a hot evening, but are audiences getting the fresh kick that good films are supposed to deliver? Movies today are like the Bush Administration in its fourth year: aimless, exhausted, myopic. They lack the vision thing...
Overall, there is something abstract and distant about Patriot Games. But there are at least four exciting preliminary confrontations between the good folks and the bad ones, and a stormy-night conclusion in which all of the above are somewhat laboriously maneuvered into a large, dark house, a device that may be conventional but is nonetheless well managed. Along with the expert binding of Ford's performance, these are the juicy raisins -- Shall we say the raisons d'etre? -- in an otherwise blandish pudding...
CINEMA Harrison Ford enlivens Patriot Games, fortunately...