Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this week's eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense of vindication. "I think the committee is saying that modern architecture is pretty good," he reckons. "Young architects are turning away from postmodernism, and I think they're going to turn toward precision...
...play well if we go into a two-minute drill" by negotiating against the deadline of the summit. Shultz replied, "If you talk like that, you'll never get anything. We won't know what we can accomplish until we try. Let's not base policy on a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...cults are all gone now, and all that is left is Rambo, here coming around for the third time. This lone figure -- pushed to the social margin, lost in self-absorption -- is apparently capable of awakening and satisfying an atavistic yearning for heroic purity in so many hearts that he is, in movie terms, cost effective no matter what the price...
...Trautman (Richard Crenna), is captured by a particularly disagreeable Soviet officer while trying to aid the Afghan rebels, Rambo is recalled to primitive business as usual. There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army...
Todd launches himself slowly and awkwardly into the world. Self-centered, given to gusts and swoons of excitement, he is, as one of his actress lovers tells him, a "great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool." Nor is he a wholly attractive fellow. His sex life is a series of not so magnificent obsessions; like his idol, he deserts his children. Irritatingly, a paranoia starts to < flare whenever he loses what he desperately wants: "control, total control...