Word: shamelessly
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What is most upsetting about the film is the shameless methods used to manipulate the emotions of the audience. You could cut the white liberal guilt in the theater with a knife. Even though the real issue at hand is mostly a technical legal and political question, Spielberg some-how extrapolates it so that it becomes a question of slavery versus non-slavery, of purist evil against innocent victims...
...judges of the court and of course the mysterious men from her past. There is, of course, absolutely no doubt that Dalgliesh will solve the mystery, save all those in distress and manage to be ridiculously heroic at all times. But we don't mind as long as the shameless thrills keep coming...
...total absence of conflict or plausibility in the story is a concern that Coppola doesn't seem worried by. Indeed, he has done something unforgivable with Rainmaker. He has made John Grisham--the king of popcorn thrillers--lethally boring. There is no shameless entertainment here, no chance to be swept up in random plot twists or instant thrills. Instead, what we get is two hours of disjointed storytelling--without a touch of drama...
...years, Gigante's lawyers and family have insisted he is a feeble, addled man going back a quarter of a century, incompetent to put on a pair of pants, let alone mastermind a secret society of schemers, thieves and assassins. But prosecutor George Stamboulidis called it a "shrewd and shameless camouflage," and a detective testified that the slow-footed Gigante developed Olympian quickness when a car bore down on him as he crossed Sixth Avenue one day. The government, however, has offered little hard evidence against Gigante, whom associates referred to with a silent tap on the chin...
...games, Herz occasionally loses her edge and blindly defends them against all criticism. Her responses to the bimboesque portrayal of women and the questionable values that the gorier games convey to children, for example, feel as shallow as an Aqua-Fresh smile (a Herzian saying). The games' shameless pandering to adolescent fantasies is explained with little more than a breezy "what teenage boys want, teenage boys get," while growing parental concern is briskly dismissed as "adults freaking out about their precious darlings being driven to new heights of deviancy by popular media...