Word: skim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHITE LIGHTNING concerns a good old boy named Gator McKluskey (Burt Reynolds) who is serving time in the Arkansas pen for messing around with illegal liquor. Word reaches him that his younger brother has been murdered by a local sheriff (Ned Beatty), who has been getting a substantial skim off the moonshine profits. McKluskey turns state's evidence in order to get himself out of prison and get the goods on the sheriff. There is grim melodrama and folk comedy here, but Screenwriter William Norton sloughs off the more serious themes of an informer working inside a situation...
...where he will operate. Headquarters executives pick out all the sites, buy (or sometimes lease) the land, arrange for construction of the store, and rent it with equipment to the licensee for 8.5% of gross, plus a 3% annual franchise fee. "We're just like the Mafia; we skim it right off the top" jokes a financial officer. In the beginning Kroc sold territorial franchises, but now a licensee buys only the right to operate at a specific address for 20 years; when the license expires, he must put up another...
...direction is characteristically light and bouncy, a necessity given the heavy-handed theme, but she does not skim over elements of sometimes tragic seriousness. Underlying Lila and Lenny's relationship, as May develops it, is an escalating dynamic of disintegration which lends the humor and fun a keen psychological edge. Lila, for all her obtuseness, senses from the start Lenny's reserve--but he refuses to tell her anything is wrong, to bring it all out in the open, since his trust and confidence in her has been broken. She frantically tries all the harder to communicate and to please...
HEALTH-FOOD fans live on more than wheat germ alone. Breakfast can include organic apple juice, Granola with skim milk and buttered protein-enriched toast. Lunch may well be almond butter on whole-wheat bread or peanut butter, bananas and berries on date-nut bread. Spinach noodles with scrambled eggs provide bulk and only 250 calories. It even leaves room for a dessert of dietetic ice cream, a bargain at 125 calories...
That still does not explain why the planes crash in the first place. Although the F-111 was designed as an all-weather craft, some flyers speculate that dense rain squalls in Viet Nam somehow foil the plane's complex TFR (terrain-following radar), which permits it to skim treetops at 200 ft. above ground at speeds of more than 500 m.p.h. Others suggest that the dense tropical humidity in Southeast Asia somehow damages its complex electronic circuits governing flight and navigational controls. But no one really knows for sure. After returning from an F-111 mission over Laos...