Word: villainized
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...saved for Dan Quayle. But they could apply as well to a movie like POINT BREAK. No picture could be handsomer. The camera moves with bold, often devious assurance; action sequences are as sleekly muscled as the torsos of the film's jock hero (Keanu Reeves) and surfer villain (Patrick Swayze). Director Kathryn Bigelow has few peers at this aerobic cinema, as she proved a few years back with the weird, beautiful Near Dark. Here, though, limning the attempts of FBI agent Reeves to infiltrate Swayze's beach-bum bank gang, Bigelow often forsakes her wits. Naked babe nukes...
...aristocracy. But this imperative belongs to the transient domains of fashion and snobbery, and in any case sycophancy is not unique to America or to Western societies. Harder to grasp is the way in which Western principles discriminate against the non-Western or nonwhite. Who or what is the villain here? Galileo? Einstein? The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? Was Martin Luther King Jr. diminished, made to feel inferior, when he read Henry David Thoreau along with Gandhi on civil disobedience? Or for that matter when he contemplated the Reformation launched by his 16th century German namesake...
...bone good ole boy, reloading one of the movie's zillion firearms with a fancy twirl of the wrist -- proving he has become, in Schwarzenegger's words, "a kinder, gentler terminator" by forswearing murder: he merely shoots off a record number of kneecaps. And T-1000 seems an ideal villain. It can replicate any person it touches and annihilate its victim with a slash of its rapier limbs: Cyborg Scissorarms. We eagerly await the moment when the T-1000 touches Arnold and puts into play two of the movies' oldest, most effective tricks. Mistaken identity! Evil twins...
...cameras produces congenial movie movement. Two of the actors carry this larkish spirit throughout the film. Geraldine McEwan, in devil-doll weeds, makes for a hilariously desiccated witch. And Alan Rickman, fairly drooling with delight at his own wickedness, plays the Sheriff of Nottingham as a vibrant cartoon villain: Snidely Whiplash rampant...
...gibing has been mixed with an abiding envy of the California megalopolis' trend-setting dynamism. But lately no amount of envy -- or imitation -- seems enough to offset the vitriol that is being aimed at L.A. from every direction. Los Angeles has become the butt of abject opprobrium -- the "villain" of the West...