Word: pete
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...truly unbelievable. Pete Rose, Julius Irving, Wayne Gretzky...the list of magnificent athletes is endless. Weekly, I am presented with the myopic American ideal of excellence: sweaty, scantily clad individuals, almost exclusively men, in various stages of exertion. Thank God for the swimsuit issue. For those of us who were consistently chosen last in grade-school kickball and who crawled through the Presidential Physical Fitness test, it is a welcome, yet brief, respite from fifty-one weeks of pornography. Michael A. Snyder...
There are obviously quite a few fundamental differences between last year's veteran team, which contained a number of proven all-Ivy performers and an experienced coach, and this year's largely freshman squad led by first-year coach Pete Roby...
...moment, Pete (played with a sinuously boyish charm by Richard Gere) has more pressing problems. He has candidates in trouble all over the map: a Governor's divorce and remarriage in the far West; a rich candidate's cabbageheaded stupidity in the Southwest; the hold on a Midwestern senatorial candidate by agents of an Arab oil state. The true purpose of these cliches and intrigues is to supply Power with some paranoiac melodrama of the kind that is nowadays never absent from movies about American politics. Pete may be involved, either as unwitting coconspirator or victim, in something more menacing...
...always disappointing when an engaging heel abandons his unprinciples to embrace moral uplift. Especially since Power has already made its points about the manipulation of political imagery in the sharply satirical sequences that show Pete creating TV spots for his candidates --sequences full of conviction, energy and a knowing cynicism that are missing from the film's more exhortatory passages. Around these later commercials for responsibility the air of the obligatory ever hovers...
...does so uncomfortably. For the issue raised but not really addressed by both these films is altogether too complicated to be resolved by civics lessons. There are people like the historical Huey and the fictional Pete who wear their amorality glamorously, who have the ability to move the practice of politics out of smoke-filled rooms and into the chambers of the yearning human heart. Conventional political morality, to which both these films retreat in good-hearted confusion, is inadequate to deal with such creatures. Art conceivably is. But today, media far more devious than a radio mike await...