Word: soullessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just $13 million, Executive Producer Jon Davison (Airplane!) has put together a sci-fi fantasy with sleek, high-powered drive. And Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director (Soldier of Orange) making his Hollywood debut, has polished the look of the film until it is seamless and pretty near soulless. Hubcaps slice off a speeding car like saw-toothed Frisbees, and gruesome death is just another way of saying "That's life." No wonder the film was almost rated X for violence; it is crazy in love with the imagination of disaster. It wants to caress the special effect...
...words might bring anything: A Dance of the Forests (1960), a dreamlike, ritualistic celebration of Nigerian independence edged with satire; Kongi's Harvest (1965), a biting attack on an Nkrumah-like dictator. Soyinka has found widespread favor without ever courting it. His writings have charged the West with soulless materialism and his fellow Africans with barbarisms and corruption. He has staked his art in a no-man's-land between conflicting cultures...
...Americana condescend to their subject with lots of sweat, foul patter, fat ladies and idiot giggling. This lurid and intermittently seductive melodrama (based on a true story) just observes Brad Sr. and his mob dispassionately, like slime mold under a microscope. They execute their robberies, and their victims, with soulless professionalism; their gangster grimaces register starkness without sexiness. Brad Jr. and his pals are hardly more exemplary. Talking tough, swigging beer, waiting for something bad to happen, they could be the Whitewood Gang in embryo...
...swashbuckling terrorist Tuttle, was taken away to be tortured and killed. Dear me, mistakes like this will happen in the Anglo-fascist fantasy world of Brazil. Imagine that Nazi Germany had colonized Britain after winning World War II, and you can visualize the film's architecture: mammoth and soulless, with huge intestinal piping that snakes through every elegant living room and posh restaurant. Imagine that the amiable English temperament was forced to accommodate itself to totalitarianism, and you can anticipate the courtesy with which the riot squad goons knock our hero, Sam Lowry, unconscious ("Sorry, sir, regulations"). Slogans...
...arguably true that the best of Hart's new ideas was to employ a capable hairdresser, and the worst of them was to avoid saying anything of substance. It's possible to see Hart as proof that the Democrats could run the kind of soulless campaign Reagan has mastered and which the state chairmen apparently want...