Word: villainized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Speed has terrified (and nicely particularized) passengers, a resourceful hero (Keanu Reeves), a gutsy heroine (the always appealing Sandra Bullock) and & a terrific villain (Dennis Hopper, doing what he does best -- rationalism gone gaga). The can't-slow-down bus ride is bookended with a pair of thrill sequences, either one of which would provide enough of a plot for most movies. Speed begins with a crowded elevator that is sometimes in free fall and is rigged to explode at a certain floor, and it ends with a driverless subway running out of control, the heroine helpless inside...
...Hero or villain? Hurwitz didn't fire anybody; he hired more workers and added a fourth mill. He continued a Pacific Lumber practice of giving a college scholarship to every employee's child who finished high school. Top hourly pay runs about $15 to $16 an hour, in an area of high unemployment. When he refinanced Pacific's debt a year ago, issuing $620 million in high-interest bonds to pay off $510 million in junkers, the fact that he also paid Maxxam a $25 million dividend from the new debt raised only murmurs. That was how the big boys...
...because everything he had to say was available in those books that no one was buying. The repellent could have been subject matter, but then only a simpleton would think that Outer Dark (1968) was just about incest or Child of God (1974) just about necrophilia. More likely, the villain was the complexity of language and thought that refused to meet the reader halfway...
...counterculture mind-set. The military hides the truth about the deadly plague and strong-arms the populace like Nazi storm troopers. The whole disaster is portrayed as an environmental corrective to the evils unleashed by the military-scientifi c complex. (It can be no accident that the villain's name is Flagg.) The good people make their stand in bucolic Boulder, Colorado; the bad guys set up headquarters in Las Vegas. Characters periodically remind each other about the perils of remaking society -- "trying to re-create the world that damn near choked the human race to death," as one puts...
When it comes to gore, The Stand is more restrained than most King horror shows, but its metaphysical flights are prodigal. Dreams and visions abound, and the demonic villain has supernatural powers of indeterminate nature. King can't resist throwing everything into the pot. A TV movie about the apocalypse can get away with quoting Eliot ("This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper") or Yeats ("What rough beast . . . slouches towards Bethlehem?"), but probably not both. Still, even when The Stand skirts tedium and pretentiousness, King is a rough beast that TV is lucky...