Word: themes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Westlake is the author of a number of intricate, blackly humorous mysteries which reflect the theme of violent role-changing that runs through this movie. The author has an obvious fascination with such switching--"Westlake" is actually a pseudonym used by a well-hidden British journalist--and it is this identity confusion which is the movie's strength...
...Europe, a guilty-secrets melodrama, a French philosophical play or an English drawing-room comedy. So he tosses elements of all these genres into his pot, and serves up the dramatic equivalent of broccoli cheese pasta--limp, stringy, with an occasional lumpy mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst sort, in which portentous declamations about the feel of people's thighs, memories of blue centaurs, the lips of doom and similar psycho-symbolic claptrap gets tossed willy-nilly at a justifiably mystified...
...starts to get interested, the moment is mercilessly crushed beneath the heel of Ribman's pompous phrasing and erratic characterization. This play is bad in a painful way, as it time and again raises your expectation that something worthwhile is about to happen, then disappoints you by dropping the theme or hiding behind a convenient cliche. The wasted talents of the director, cast, designers and crew make the spectacle all the more pitiful. Sweettable never bores you; it just makes you want to whack the playwright a few times with a Riverside Shakespeare...
...dropped from 665 to 251 between the first and the second half of last year. Under the country's harsh press restrictions, no violent incidents can be reported on or photographed by journalists. The decreased coverage adds to the public's sense of returning normality. Botha's anti-Americanism theme is likely to win a favorable response. In 1977 his party ran a campaign against Jimmy Carter, who was then pressuring South Africa for changes in apartheid policies, and won a resounding victory...
...task has the general aim of sharply cutting back on costs to make dramatic and durable improvements in long-term profitability and growth. Restructuring's theme is "back to basics." That means, among other things, an end to the corporate ethos of expansion for expansion's sake. It spells farewell to the notion, always more imagined than real, of the corporation as a kind of private-sector welfare state, with unlimited perks and unshakable job security. It also involves frequently deep retrenchment, as U.S. corporations cut back on marginal operations, strip away unnecessary layers of management and staff and refocus...