Word: taxi
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...movie that its own maker defines largely by negatives. "It was rarely 'Wouldn't it be great to do that?', but more often 'Better not do this,' " says Director James L. Brooks, who shared creative credit for both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi on television and who spent four years adapting Larry McMurtry's novel to the screen. How, indeed, are they going to handle the writer-director's entirely accurate description of the way his film works: "There is never a moment in the picture that takes...
...coach carries on like a sensitive drill sergeant, psyching his team into a football frenzy by using curses, inspirational locker-room speeches and the odd face-mask violation. Michael Chapman, who graduated to the director's chair with this film after making his name as the cinematographer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Personal Best, brings a virginal intensity to each hoary plot device. He hardly gives his audience time to realize that the football team is only an updated platoon from a 1940s war movie (the Irishman with his well-fingered rosary, the Italian with his letch...
...gate many of the fugitives simply flagged down passing motorists and forced them out of their cars. One group of about 15 men stole three vehicles from a local farm, forcing a teen-age boy to explain the automatic controls of a car. Another tried to escape in a taxi. Police dragged four men, all of them either naked or clad only in underpants, out of the nearby River Lagan, where they had been submerged and were breathing through reeds. Another was marched away, blood dripping from a gunshot wound to his arm. The apprehended man grinned at Eyewitness Winston...
Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan...
...Japanese have adopted many Chinese words, though the two languages remained entirely separate. Nor was Chinese the only foreign element. Portuguese missionaries later introduced pan (bread), and Dutch traders biiru (beer). Then came the tidal wave of English. Some of these Japanized words filled a practical need (takushi, taxi, or rajio, radio), while some were primarily fashionable (kohi-shoppu, coffee shop...