Word: subverters
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Holland does not cloak that riddle as well as she might, and her variation on the Martin Guerre (or Sommersby) theme is predictable. But as she showed in last year's Europa, Europa, she also has a way of administering jolts from the blue that usefully subvert our narrative and moral expectations. The value of this bleak film, which says that the family, like any other institution, requires agreed-upon fictions to sustain itself, derives from that talent...
Does this sound too conspiratorial to be true? On August 25, 1986, the Wall Street Journal cited an unnamed Administration official saying that the U.S. was beginning a covert military operation to subvert Khadafi. The three major television networks picked up the Journal's story and repeated its assertions. When European allies became nervous, U.S. officials publicly backed off from this policy, but the idea had already taken hold throughout the world--and presumably with Khadafi himself...
...environmental matters, people like An Gorsuch were set in place to subvert the clear intent of laws like the Clean Air and Water Acts, as well as bills concerning toxic waste. On other domestic fronts, people like Sam Pierce, now the subject of a grand jury investigation, almost totally wrecked any commitment the federal government had to the Fair Housing Act, and to low and moderate income housing...
While presenting Clive's and Martin's versions of the heterosexual marriage as oppressive, the play judges the other relationships more leniently simply because they subvert this patriarchal normalcy. Harry's relationship with Edward in the first act is nothing but child abuse, and his fling with Joshua, the servant, can be seen as imperialistic exploitation. But these "relationships" are portrayed as merely alternative lifestyles, the gleeful return of the repressed in Clive's oh-so-normal British household...
...With their preposterous narratives, fractured editing, tatty sets and monotonous line readings, they play like doomed dress rehearsals. First you are drawn into the catastrophe of the filmmaking process, like a rubbernecking motorist passing a road kill. Then you notice that these movies are doubly subversive: they not only subvert themselves, they rebel against the timid rules of traditional filmmaking. In this sense, bad movies are the first modernist movies, as the French long ago realized. "Learn to go see the 'worst' films," wrote Ado Kyrou in the 1957 Le Surrealisme au Cinema. "They are sometimes sublime...