Word: shock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Then came the shock. After a few hours, the black-uniformed troops began firing into the air. It was a signal for Phnom Penh's entire population, swollen by refugees to some 3 million, to abandon the city. Young and old, the well and the sick, businessmen and beggars, were all ordered at gunpoint onto the streets and highways leading into the countryside...
Perhaps the greatest shock has been in France, a country where many of Cambodia's new rulers learned their Marx and where worship of revolution has for years been something of a national obsession among the intelligentsia. Said New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, a former leftist who has turned against Marxism: "We thought of revolution in its purest form as an angel. The Cambodian revolution was as pure as an angel, but it was barbarous. The question we ask ourselves now is, can revolution be anything but barbarous...
...danger and 2) something big is going on. Finally, of course, unavoidable evidence develops, and we cut to the chase. Alas, Director Colin Higgins has no higher skill in staging action than he does in inventing original comic situations. The most he can manage is some vulgar shock effects and a few Hitchcock ripoffs...
...American. U.S. television is a big turn-off for Europeans. So, at least initially, are permissive child rearing, much so-called gourmet food, gun-toting cops, blah-blah cocktail parties, football and baseball, bubble gum, littered streets, first-naming on first encounter, and such other indue -ers of culture shock as the warning on a hotel dressing table that greeted one European couple on their first night in New York: YOUR DAY ENDS...
Still, despite its obvious frothiness, Heaven Can Wait is a good escapist film, certainly a nice break from yet another wave of shock and disaster movies. While Beatty and company may not deliver Oscar-winning performances, they do provide something we all need a bit of now and then--good, old-fashioned...