Word: winstone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perverse and paradoxical as it seems, the central assumption underlining attempts to keep the nuclear peace for decades has been that offense is good and defense bad. The superpowers have been deterred from nuclear war by the certainty of retribution. Safety, as Winston Churchill noted in 1955, would be "the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation." Each side had to have confidence that it could survive an enemy first strike and retaliate with a vengeance. That way, neither side would have the incentive to strike first. This principle, described sardonically as Mutual Assured Destruction...
...high point of Thatcher's visit was her speech before Congress. The last British Prime Minister so honored was Winston Churchill in 1952. Dressed in a black suit and flowered blouse, Thatcher received a two-minute standing ovation as she stepped onto the podium. After noting that Churchill had enjoyed a "special advantage" because his American mother had given him "ties of blood with you," Thatcher drew laughter by dryly adding, "Alas for me, these are not matters we can readily arrange for ourselves...
Occasionally, though, this emotional barrage can be tiresome. Radford gives us endless scenes of Winston standing on a lusciously green hillside, symbolizing his longing for an ideal world. This repetition seems out of character with the action pace of the film: more at home with the bogus psychological exploitation of Pink Floyd's The Wall than Orwell. Especially pretentious is the final shot of this sequence, where we learn that this mythical "Green Acres" lies in Rm, 101, the room of everyone's worst fear. Mixing symbols like this might work for a Bergman, but it has failed almost everybody...
Equally flaccid is Radford's one stab at interpreting Orwell. After Winston's love has been ripped out of him and he has renounced Julia and himself, he sits alone and scrawls "2 plus 2 equals" in the dust of a café tabletop. The purpose of this open-ended conclusion is a mystyery only God and Bergman, but certainly not Radford, can solve. Not only does it break the emotional tone of the film and make the viewer think, but it leaves the viewer with half-developed food for thought. A far more appropriate ending would have been Orwell...
...good thing about this film though, is that you don't notice its many flaws until you leave the theatre. The film bullies you in the same way the O'Brien bullies Winston, breaking down your resistance and forcing you to despair. When Winston cracks under the threat of the rat cage and screams "Do to Julia," the actual sound of the cry sends shivers up your spine in a way that mere printed words cannot...