Word: turnings
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...played by Cybill Shepherd) and the girl he wanted to protect (Jodie Foster). For Ronnie, Brandi is the woman he aspires to - he says, with feeling, "She's the prettiest girl in this entire mall, if not the world" - though in Faris' acute performance, her dull eyes and sour turn of mouth tell us she should be placed not on a pedestal but in the trash bin. And Nell (Colette Wolfe) is the nicest girl Ronnie doesn't quite notice: a smiling, saintly, abused cripple of near Dickensian poignancy...
...That neat dichotomy - the tramp who turns Ronnie's head, the darling who's available to win his heart - should cue you that Observe and Report isn't going to have the courage to follow the premise to its logical conclusion. As ballsy as the movie is, it has one undescended testicle. It's bound to turn this disturbed cur into an underdog, and then a top dog. The bitter aftertaste that was permitted, in fact encouraged, in '70s movies is virtually verboten today. A feel-good ending is mandatory, even in a comedy like this, which promises...
...scheme seemed a bit convoluted from the start, but it offered oodles of money to the participants. An American investor agreed to lease tram and subway cars from BVG, Berlin's mass-transit company. And BVG, in turn, leased them back for terms ranging from 12 to 30 years. Under U.S. tax law at the time, the American investor was able to take a depreciation tax benefit on the equipment because it was held on a long-term lease - a financial benefit the investor shared with BVG. (Read about Paris' public bicycle system...
...they quickly paid off. Over the many deals, BVG received cash payments from the American investors totaling €68.9 million, or about $90.6 million at current exchange rates. BVG in turn paid the American investors monthly rent to use the equipment, a return the Americans enhanced with that big tax break. For its part, BVG used the money it derived from the deals to pay down debt, which has saved it €35 million ($46 million) in interest payments. It was a shell game of sorts, but everyone made out - except, of course, the U.S. taxpayers, who were unwittingly subsidizing...
...plus 37,000 from its allies. The latest Afghan war is now Obama's war. The Administration has signaled that it is downsizing expectations about what can still be achieved: the principal goal now is to counter terrorism and bring a degree of stability to Afghanistan - not to turn a poor and fractious nation into a flourishing democratic state. When Obama laid out his new strategy last month, he made it clear that the mark of success would be the ability "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country...