Word: villainizing
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...hopes for 1989 are the result of high drama in 1988. Twice, just as the curtain was coming down on the old year, a major figure stepped to the edge of the footlights and delivered a soliloquy intended to persuade the world that he is tired of playing a villain. He pledged that the policies he represents had changed in fundamental and salutary ways. And the audience, including a skeptical American President, applauded...
...BIGGEST BEEF Considered a villain by anticholesterol forces, beef has taken a drubbing in sales in recent years. Now, thanks in part to a diligent advertising campaign ("beef: real food for real people") and undoubtedly to the natural longing for this most American of meats, sales are increasing in many parts of the country, in some areas as much as 20%. But many butchers bow to the times and trim all visible gristle...
...Durand's narrative, and J. Maxwell Brownjohn's translation, cold feet are "like blocks of ice." A bashed villain goes "out like a light." A neighborhood is "as silent as the grave." An event happens "in a flash." Matters are as clear "as daylight." If the author were competing with John le Carre, these bromides might undo his tale...
There are no moral complexities here, no cunning passages of history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against...
...hard to imagine more odious citizens than some of those portrayed in Blind Faith. The villain of Fatal Vision had a perverse stature and a demonic intelligence that are totally lacking in McGinniss's Robert Marshall. His fabrications and the entreaties recorded on love cassettes to his mistress suggest a ludicrous absence of self-awareness. Marshall's low animal cunning hits bottom when he exploits his sons' conflict between filial loyalty and the truth about their mother's death. McGinniss makes the Marshall boys' loss of innocence the emotional center of an otherwise lurid and coldhearted book...