Word: thunder
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...this thunder now, especially from a President whose tax cuts and military spending increases obviously had something to do with the deficits that he now decries? Explained a top Reagan aide: "Ronald Reagan will be cast as the guy who wants to keep down taxes. That is important politically." For the White House, the acrimonious struggle in the Senate to pass a budget resolution had become virtually irrelevant. Declared a presidential aide: "We've pretty well made up our minds on a budget strategy, no matter what the Senate does." The plan, he went on, is for Reagan...
...BLUE THUNDER Directed by John Badham...
...latest in supersnooping devices, the whirling bird is intended to attack such segments of the U.S. civilian population as happen to get unruly-though in these placid times the film makers are hard-pressed to find a domestic threat worthy of their hardware. The principal business of Blue Thunder is to offer a garish and entirely unpersuasive audiovisual demonstration of this preposterous machine in action...
This is a defect it shares with whoever conceived Blue Thunder, which is by far the lesser of Badham's back-to-back releases. The film's nominal plot has Roy Scheider as a good Los Angeles police department chopper ace assigned to test what amounts to a flying gun platform. Once he discovers its illiberal potential, he must fight his way past Malcolm McDowell, an old neofascist enemy from his Viet Nam days now employed as a power-elite gunslinger. After that dogfight comes a showdown with a couple of Air Force jets...
Badham gets a lot of distracting colored lights and video screens flashing madly while the lad works against a deadline to talk his electronic pal out of launching a preventive strike against the U.S.S.R. But, as with the end of Blue Thunder, there is more of technique than of conviction in this work. It may be that Badham is an exemplary case: yet another talented craftsman caught up in Hollywood's current belief that the big bucks are in the big-bang school of moviemaking. In War Games the search for a big, effects-laden finish does not render...