Word: tracks
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...acting out a one-man play on the perils of overtraining and stifling national pressure, star hurdler Liu Xiang, the face of China's Olympics, arrived in the Bird's Nest to run his first qualifying race - then turned his back to the crowd and limped off the track. After a shocked silence, the weeping announcers on Chinese TV intoned that it was acceptable to continue idolizing Liu because he had done his best. But gold-medal fever returned soon enough, with by-the-minute updates on just how many victories the host nation had tallied...
...critic and, not incidentally, a serious film connoisseur. Richard e-mails me that Manny "frequently did these bird's-eye views (I call them table tops) in which the whole canvas is filled with figures, houses, objects, photographs, all seen from above, and frequently (not always) connected by train track that carries your eye all around the canvas. They always struck me as being like his writing about movies, where he puts before you this world of bright particulars picked out by his magpie eye and connected by his very original train of thought...
...futurism; it's a Daily Kos blog.) On a nouveau Alcatraz called Terminal Island, Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen, merging her purse-lipped Pat Nixon impersonation with the imperious tenseness of Dick Nixon in late-Watergate mode) is in charge of an annual televised car-nage held on a giant track within the prison. In this Death Race, lifers drive the souped-up, heavily armed autos, and are promised an early release if they win five races. One of the inmates, a masked mystery man known as Frankenstein, is a four-time champion, hence the pay-per-view audience's favorite...
...cars are armed, but the track is booby-trapped. Manhole covers may explode as the cons drive over them; guards with machine guns open fire at Hennessey's command; one car gets napalmed. It's like al Qaeda at Daytona. Naturally, several of the participants, racing careers are ended prematurely - beheading is the movie's favorite form of early retirement - which forces competing drivers to become occasional allies, as when Ames and Machine Gun Joe "play a little offense," teaming up to demolish one of Hennessey's fire-spewing trucks. Round and round they go, till...
...star hurdler Liu Xiang arrived in the Bird's Nest to run his first qualifying race - and then decided that it was all too much. The athlete who was supposed to be the face of China's Olympics turned his back to the crowds and limped off the track. After a shocked silence, the weeping announcers on Chinese TV intoned that it was acceptable to continue idolizing Liu because he had done his best. Very quickly, however, gold-medal fever returned, with by-the-minute updates on just how many victories the host nation had tallied...