Word: stuffs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...address to the Knesset, Carter displayed a new appreciation for graceful language and thought, deciding in those critical circumstances to go beyond himself ("Doubts are the stuff of great decisions, but so are dreams"). Men like Spinoza, whom he had rarely allowed entry into his down-home rhetoric, showed up ("Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice...
Lemmon, through the sheer integrity of his playing −no cute stuff, no obvious plays for sympathy −is outstanding as an essentially lonely man who has built his life around his dials and gauges, and then learns that they have been programmed from the start to deceive...
...newshawks get back to the station, the utility's p.r. man has persuaded the news director that nothing really happened. Douglas, a hot-tempered liberaloid activist, smells a conspiracy; Fonda, a careerist, doesn't much care. She's just another pretty face introducing the human-interest stuff. But Douglas persists, the company steps up its villainy, and slowly Fonda's conscience and consciousness begin to stir...
...disco at the Wailea Beach Hotel; the Royal Lahaina's Foxy Lady packs in upper teenagers and the Tommy Dorsey set in equal numbers. The island's hottest spot is the Bluemax, in the town of Lahaina, where visiting Elton John and Linda Ronstadt have done their stuff off the cuff; the place is packed nightly in hopes that other drop-in stars may relieve the resident combo...
...discomfiting question remains: what makes these films so riveting, when we would have little interest or patience for the same stuff on paper or in the hands of a less talented director? It is largely Carpenter's gleeful knowingness, in constructing a situation and co-ordinating an action, with regard to what his audience expects or surmises from any given scene. He tugs at the nerves most sharply through sly scare-tactics: close calls, delays, false alarms, the expectation and possibility of violence as often as the brutal thing itself. He can make sudden action at once surprising and coherent...