Word: trained
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...done in the U.S. got so prickly after three weeks of talks that "we walked away saying, 'Let's part in friendship.' " The Chinese, Goldberg recalls, then coolly "took us to the Peking opera that evening and the next morning put us on a train to Ts'ing-tao to see the brewery there. Through the train window, they said, 'We'll see you in Peking to resume negotiations.' They had wanted to see if we might say something different, the night before, when we were together socially. We didn...
...MOST EXCITING moment in Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery comes during the first 15 minutes of the film: Leslie Anne Down slips off her stockings, sticks her rear end into the camera and slides vertically over Sean Connery into bed. Visually, this evokes a shot in Crichton's last film, Coma, where Genevieve Bujold slipped off her stockings, stuck her rear end into the camera and climbed a ladder. Crichton is a clever man, a Harvard graduate; those pretty rear ends may be his way of saying, "Shit on you, folks...
...Great Train Robbery is one of the most cynical "pure escapist" movies ever made. Crichton hasn't even bothered to conceal his disgust for his lifeless hackwork. He crams his screenplay with adventure-movie cliches, but he doesn't poke fun at them; he piles them on as if to show how much he can get away with. Movies like this aren't very entertaining if they're not stylish or suspenseful; Crichton's stupid, stilted dialogue precludes style; the Mission: Impossible predictability, sluggish editing, and surprising number of loose ends strangle suspense. Characters inexplicably appear and disappear--dragged...
Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies...
...wealthy bluebloods he swindles. But Connery's low-key performance is often vitiated by Donald Sutherland's uncharacteristically broad caricature of a bum bling aide-de-crime. Then again, when the delicious leading lady is at hand, both men tend to fade away. The great train robbery may well have been the crime of its century, but it looks like petty theft compared with Down's ability to steal a scene. -Frank Rich