Word: subways
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...iconic headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." An army of the emotionally disturbed, evicted en masse from state mental hospitals, made cardboard-box homes on the streets. Graffiti festooned many tenement buildings and scarred the exteriors and interiors of the city's decrepit transit system. Sitting inside a subway car, with its garish scrawls, was like being trapped in someone's deranged mind, screaming out madness from within its metal walls. (See photos of the inner workings of the world's megacities...
Without even trying, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the new thriller starring John Travolta as a criminal who hijacks a Manhattan subway train and Denzel Washington as the transit employee who tries to stop him, is a tale of two cities: New York in 1974 and New York today...
...wanna know"), and the hijacked passengers aren't so scared that they can't give a lot of lip back to their captors. The transit hierarchy is clogged with wise guys. "What the hell do they expect for their lousy 35 cents?" one executive says of the subway hostages. "To live forever?" Another MTA veteran boldly and unwisely struts down the tracks toward the kidnapped train. "Why don't you go grab a goddam aeroplane like everybody else?" he shouts to one of the gunmen. "'Cause we're afraid of flyin'," the bad guy replies, and - BLAM - kills...
...Actually, the most disconcerting aspect of the new Pelham 1 2 3 is the sight of Washington, the usually impeccable movie hero, sitting at a subway dispatcher's console. The star looks puffy and has a gut you could park a Hummer on. Weighing in at a sedentary 220 lb. (100 kg), he's playing a desk jockey burdened by the usual bureaucratic bull plus a scandal that has put his career in the commode. (In the original film, Matthau rarely rose to anger; he was a weary, wily guy, just doing his job. This time it's personal...
...relic of that halcyon era of 2008, when the movie was shot. And by emphasizing the cop-killer relationship, the picture loses the original's busy fresco of New Yawk types. Pushing, complaining, invading the space of the movie's stars, they were the graffiti in this subway docudrama...