Word: swarmming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recently returned from a visit to the homeland that I had never seen. Although its proliferating population remains China's greatest obstacle to modernization, I agree with White that human envy and appetite are potentially equally dangerous perils. While walking down a bustling Shanghai boulevard, I encountered a swarm of people surrounding a street merchant. What was the object of everyone's smiling fascination? A Rubik's Cube...
...archetypes to manipulate political loyalties. The Israeli prosecutor has the superior smile of a bureaucrat conquistador. The Palestinian is tall, thin, suntanned, nice to babies; and he has unflinching crystal blue eyes (would they lie to you?). And yet, the film bends over backward to seem fair to its swarm of social and personal ambiguities. The result is a well-meaning muddle that refuses to come alive. The pace is languid when it ought to fall into the march step of melodrama. Hanna K. does boast what may be a film first: an infant's circumcision, in closeup...
Scenes such as the Isaacsons' execution, the demonstrations to free them (complete with Daniel and his sister. Susan, standing fear-fully at the podium with their parents lawyer), and the seemingly unwarranted descent of a swarm of FBI officials upon the Isaacson home are understandable as evocations of Daniel's emotional perspective. But if one is searching for a statement on the Rosenberg case, such scenes come off as manipulative powerplays intended to win over the audience's sympathy for the Rosenbergs/Isaacsons using emotional rather than rational or factual devices...
...silence is shattered. A swarm of schoolchildren in black uniforms enters, frisking and chattering. They horse around obliviously in the timelessness...
...jerks come here Friday and Saturday nights when the heroin is cut and the cocaine drowned with baby laxative," says the Captain in a voice as sharp as a razor blade. Three police cars scream past, their flashing lights turning the rain puddles red. A block ahead, the police swarm into a building. The Captain watches: "It's safer to score when the cops are all around. They usually let you go after they bust you and being busted is better than being dead." Last year the Captain was shot five times in the chest...