Word: venal
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...jewelry, Incan pottery, Olmec figurines-are smuggled out of Mexico, Central America and the Andean nations of South America. The illicit trade easily reaches millions of dollars annually and involves characters so bizarre they might have stepped out of an old Humphrey Bogart film: shrewd peasants, soldiers of fortune, venal archaeologists, dealers, diplomats and collectors who are ready to pay-or do-almost anything to satisfy their greed...
Director Peter Hyams' script does its best to exploit the latest fashions in paranoia. There are interwoven conspiracies and cover-ups; every U.S. Government official on view is a venal scoundrel. Hyams' cynical fantasies about the space program are an especially amusing treat. He suggests, with malicious wit, that NASA'S space walks could actually have taken place on Earth: indeed, he demonstrates that for the price of a video camera and a few buckets of sand, any American can take a giant step for mankind in the privacy of his own home...
...Clausists grew in number even though The Santa Corporation hired agents of the darkest, most venal kind to destroy the movement. The people had simply had too much festivity; they were sick of it; they wanted a break from the fun. The corporate agent's most heavy-handed tactics could not persuade the people to whoop it up one week more...
...epoch. What emerges beneath the dazzling exteriors is a subtext of Russell's idiosyncratic personal peeves. His movie is perhaps understandably anti-journalist and anti-mogul, since both have lately been unkind to Russell. But the representatives of these groups are seen to be so preposterously venal, so unredeemably evil, that one half expects to see them appear twirling mustaches and ready to tie Valentino to the nearest railroad tracks...
...miles north of Rome. The previous summer I had sat like millions of others in a living room in the middle of suburbia and watched, like a soap opera addict, as one top Nixon aide after another came before the Senate Watergate committee to hint at the various venal sins committed by the administration still in power. Like so many others, I drew the routine conclusion that Nixon was a paranoid scum, and wondered how much longer he would cling to the Oval Office. It took them a year to flush...