Word: vaines
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Even a pre-MTV adult can find the game exhilarating -- for about an hour. Then it runs out of gas or fizzles out, as Gremlins 2 pretends to and ultimately does. At the climax, when other movies are accelerating, a dyna- movie must slow down in a vain search for emotional heft. By the end, viewers may be exhausted from information overload. Instead of leaving the theater with a rosy glow or warm tears, dyna-moviegoers feel like a James Bond vodka martini. They have been shaken but not stirred...
...Father dictated one reel after another, he began to agonize about what would happen to his memoirs. "It's all in vain," he would say during our Sunday walks. "Our efforts are useless. Everything's going to be lost. As soon as I die, they'll take it away and destroy it, or bury it so deep that there'll be no trace of it." Deep down I agreed with him. The fact that everything was quiet now didn't mean that it would continue that way forever...
...again. An American news network decided to make a biographical film about him. But the Soviet side interpreted it as a provocation, a hostile move. Brezhnev couldn't bear any mention of Khrushchev's name. People like him, who are soft and weak on the one hand and vain on the other, have a peculiar way of perceiving and "processing" their bad deeds. Having done something wrong, they project their guilt onto their victim, trying in this way to justify their actions to themselves and to the world. Father's name stood in the way of Brezhnev's attempt...
...leader Lech Walesa attempted to fire Adam Michnik, editor in chief of the union's daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborca. Feeling increasingly left out of the government that he helped create, Walesa is seeking to become the country's President; his sacking of Michnik is seen as nothing but a vain attempt to show that he is still capable of exerting power. But Michnik refused to step down, telling Walesa: "You are slowly changing into a Caesar...
DEPARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW. Members of Violeta Chamorro's new government in Nicaragua keep finding little surprises bequeathed to them by the defeated Sandinistas. Some offices have been stripped of everything but the nails on which pictures once hung. The new Minister of Communications searched his premises in vain for accounting ledgers; he did discover a contract for the purchase of 22 new Toyotas, for $392,000, all apparently driven off by army members. The incoming mayor of Managua learned that $52,192.53 was distributed as bonuses to six employees, some of whom quit promptly when he took office...