Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plot is explained in what has to be the clumsiest exposition ever. After escaping from one town and holing up in a motel, Harry reads the newspaper article about the Popes' disappearance to Danny, as if the two of them had forgotten their own lives. Running on Empty is that kind of movie. People turn on the TV or the radio just in time to catch exactly that news report which pertains to them...
...tune and a simpering, streetcorner Bible thumper, also played by Waits; another shifts between Waits singing on stage, and, as Frank, mouthing the same song on the roof of a building, as if the hard-luck lyrics were straight reportage of what's below him. Because there's no plot or dialogue to speak of, almost everything is conveyed by symbol--the three characters, the handheld lamp which focuses the audience's attention on his face, the bathtub that Frank sings in at the movie's end, in his only onstage appearance...
Despite its confident lyricism and clear passions, Tracks bears the marks of the academic writers' workshop. The device of alternating the voices of the two narrators is schematic and of limited tonal interest. Plot is subordinated to episodic tours de force. In small doses, the graphic descriptions are impressive, but they can also be so relentless as to make the author sound like the thinking reader's Jean Auel...
...Department of Education warned in 1983, a foreign power scheming to weaken America could not have concocted a more insidious plot than the debasement of public education. The threat to U.S. security ranges from the fact that nearly a quarter of military recruits cannot understand written safety instructions to the growing shortage of students in science and engineering. At the dawn of a new era of international competition, less than one-quarter of public high school students are currently enrolled in a foreign-language course. The bulk of American students cannot locate the world's most important nations...
What can be done to help U.S. companies gain global clout? Many business leaders and economists contend that major companies must be permitted to work together, in some cases to plot joint international strategies. According to economists like Lester Thurow, dean of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, U.S. antitrust laws may be out of date in an era when it is virtually impossible for one company to monopolize the world market. In Japan major companies work together and with government planners to a much greater degree. Says Motorola's Weisz: "We can't continue as a house divided against...