Word: wizard
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...AFTER A WHILE, everyone becomes his job," declares the self-proclaimed Wizard of New York cabbies to Travis. The Wizard (Peter Boyle) holds court in the fluorescent, all-night Bellmore Cafeteria, nocturnal stalking ground for taxi drivers and absurdly elegant pimps. The Wizard makes his remarks self-deprecatingly, dismisses them with a "what the hell do I know, I'm just a cabbie," but this idea is the animating force for the movie's action...
...emotions, but unlike them, she is not motivated by fear. Rather, it is her job to calculate the effect stimuli will have on "the electorate" and to organize the stimuli in a way that will best promote her product. "After a while, everyone becomes his job," warns the Wizard, and Betsy has clearly completed the evolution. She is an ice-queen (Shepherd seems incapable of playing anything else), self-possessed for as long as she can sustain her fortress of manila folders and coy sexuality. But when Travis takes her to a 42nd Street moviehouse, she runs--the scent...
...memory and tells him pedantically that his suffering is necessary, since "only through suffering can you achieve pain." In another beautifully controlled sequence, an imaginary monopoly game becomes a metaphor for life; in this game without dice, escape from jail is possible only through strategems appropriated directly from The Wizard...
...important. What is important-and very nicely done too-is the way everyone reverts instantly to childhood in moments of crisis. Moriarty (Leo McKern) is set up as a math wizard, for example, but his blackboard is covered with a second-grader's mistakes. When he conducts an auction of the purloined parchment, he is reduced to counting on his fingers as he tries to convert francs into pounds. Later Moriarty and DeLuise (playing a hammy opera singer) squabble over the document in a manner more appropriate to four-year-olds disputing possession of a pail in a sandpile...
...points are telling. His description of the press's mishandling of rumors that the FBI conspired to wipe out the Black Panthers is convincing. So is his examination of the coverage given the multinational empire of Bernie Cornfield, whom the press presented to the American public as a financial wizard rather than the shyster he's been exposed as. An essay on ABC's successful attempt to increase its newstime Nielsen ratings by tailoring its news to fit its viewers is also persuasive; his evidence makes it clear the network views news as an item to be sold rather than...