Word: potemkin
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...street near the American ambassador's residence, where Ronald Reagan will be staying, has been repaved. Buildings opposite the Kremlin have been repainted in pastel colors. Even the grassy boulevard in front of a home Nancy Reagan may visit has been replanted. Like a latter-day Potemkin village, Moscow last week was being spruced up for next week's summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But the most noteworthy preparation for the superpower sit-down was in progress about 2,000 miles from the Kremlin on the dusty, sunbaked plateaus of northern Afghanistan. There a convoy...
...perfectly capable of trying to prescribe penicillin to fix a broken window. All it could do was rigidly test the applicability of various rules to pieces of data. This led critics like Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., to dismiss expert systems like Mycin as "Potemkin villages. You move a little to the left, and you see it's all a facade...
...dubious about the prospects for turning them into weapons. Moreover, they may never be tested in space because of restrictions imposed by international arms agreements. The aluminum-foil- covered model that Reagan so proudly inspected is, in the words of John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a "Potemkin village" -- a hollow shell...
...scope of Gorbachev's reforms and the vigor with which they are being pursued indicate that they are not merely a Potemkin village of minor improvements designed for foreign consumption. Standing before the Central Committee last month, Gorbachev irrevocably put his political future on the line in favor of principles that sound like those the West has always championed: economic freedom, individual rights and private initiative...
There are the familiar De Palma touches: lots of photogenic blood, a gorgeous tracking shot that leads our heroes from euphoria to horror, an endlessly elaborate set piece reminiscent of the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin. But the director's chief contribution is to the film's handsome physical design. "I wanted corruption to look very sleek," he says. "Some people in positions of power with ill-gotten money insulate themselves with over-the-top magnificence. They buy paintings and expensive clothes. And deep inside they know they're cheats and killers...