Word: sadists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against the Germans...
...strategy is sound. For Barbie is that familiar archetype, the sadist whose dark impulses might have remained impotent had they not been licensed by a police bureaucracy demanding results, and no questions asked. This pathology is beyond comprehension by conventional reportage, beyond control by conventional moral opprobrium. Confronting him, the decent individual can only defend his own integrity. The painful cost of that integrity is shown by the survivors of Barbie's interrogations, the witnesses to his depredations, in the interviews that form the film's redemptive center...
...told to look on the bright side: "You'll get all the best parking spaces." But for Allan, this is a life near death. His mother (Joyce Van Patten) cloys and crushes. His girlfriend runs off with the surgeon who may have botched his operation. His nurse, a sulky sadist named Maryanne (Christine Forrest), cares more for her parakeet than for her patient. And Allan's best friend (John Pankow) is a mad scientist of the cybernetic age, Cuisinarting the genes of capuchin monkeys. One of these -- she's called Ella -- is placed in the care of the comely Melanie...
...there is still an Art that transcends sexual foibles and the quirks of personality, then Huffington's book--and her approach to the subject--is a failure. Her critique of Picasso the publicity seeker and sadist makes no contribution to our understanding of the artist at work and very little to our understanding of the artist at play...
Rambo III will collect a certain amount of contempt for projecting, at this ! late date, a ludicrous cold war stereotype -- the Soviet as gibbering sadist -- and a certain amount of comment for going into release just as the Soviets are withdrawing from Afghanistan. But what is the spirit of glasnost compared with the needs of a successful actor's ego and his fans' expectations? Somebody has to keep the priorities straight around here...