Word: reporter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just after 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, police received a report that two men brandishing weapons had tied up two pharmacy workers and filled four plastic trash bags with drugs...
...mistook it for a documentary. Few criticized it for ignoring or caricaturing the Vietnamese. Instead, Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and to claim the soul of an innocent. In both films, the local nonwhites -- yellow...
...integrity. The other conceit is as low-road as the plot twist in a kung fu scuzzathon. The film imagines that the FBI imported a free-lance black operative to terrorize the town's mayor into revealing the murderers' names. Taken (like much else in the picture) from a report in William Bradford Huie's 1965 casebook, Three Lives for Mississippi, the scene invariably gooses a cheer out of its audience -- almost a rebel yell. But its grizzly machismo represents an '80s-movie solution to a '60s for-real enigma: Dirty Harry beats dirty laundry...
...facts to make the viewer suspicious, and enough distortions to be the truth. Maybe it is every bit as unfair to the FBI, which pursued the case vigorously and effectively, as it is to Freedom Riders. But whose truth is it anyway? Every film -- or every biography or news report or memory -- is distorted, if only by one's perceptions. To create art is to pour fact into form; and sometimes the form shapes the facts. William Randolph Hearst never said "Rosebud," and Evita Peron didn't sing pop, and Richard III was probably a swell guy, no matter...
...humanitarian terms, the picture is equally grim. In its annual report, the United Nations Children's Fund blames the debt crisis for lowering the quality of life for almost 900 million people over the past decade. If the current trend continues, UNICEF warns, the debt problem will cause the deaths of 18 million children a year by the end of the century...