Word: perfection
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paul Scott's Raj Quartet to an inept film of E.M. Forster's A Pasage to India--even Bertolucci's The Last Emperor--films about imperialism, and particularly its demise, have become hits here and in Europe. Offering torrid plots set in tropical lands, films about empire have the perfect formula for success--glory, romance, violence and politics...
...strong woman's degradation more than it does her flesh. And the film's carnage is emetic, not exploitative. The crowning with thorns, the scourging at the pillar, the agonized trudge up Calvary show what Jesus suffered and why. Dafoe's spiky, ferocious, nearly heroic performance is a perfect servant to the role. He finds sense in Jesus' agonies; he finds passion in the parables...
...crime was perfect only in its ghoulish symbolism: the perpetrators allegedly drew blood from poor people, paying them as little as 50 cents a vial, then falsely claimed the samples came from Medicaid patients and billed the Government for millions of dollars' worth of bogus laboratory tests. The alleged Medicaid rip-off, for which a physician and nine others were indicted in New York City, was only the most lurid example in a chain gang of new and continuing fraud cases that shuffled across front pages last week. In virtually every one of half a dozen scams, members...
Perhaps no trial is greater than the constant and solitary hardening of will. And few champions must strive for it in a solitude as perfect as Jackie Joyner-Kersee's. Four years ago, she narrowly lost the gold medal because a hamstring pull hobbled her in the 800-meter run. Now she has so greatly outdistanced the field in the heptathlon, that epic ordeal in seven acts, that the only rival in the corner of her eye is the memory of her last triumph. Since 1984 she has set the heptathlon world record and bettered it twice; she has shared...
...live in an age of star quantity, when actors bulk up and become icons. Watching Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger from film to film, moviegoers follow their new, improved musculature like twists in a plot of enlightened egotism. They are comic-book heroes -- impossibly perfect, way too perfect -- in 3-D. They are their own apotheoses, their own parodies...