Word: switcheroo
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...past decade has seen experiments like documentary maker Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days for FX, a brilliant trading-places switcheroo. (For instance, an anti-immigration militant spent a month living the life of an illegal alien.) Wife Swap is an intriguing show about American subcultures (homeschoolers, political activists, etc.) and the natural tendency of parents to secretly judge one another. TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, about the fecund Duggars, may be an extreme-parenting freak show, but it's also a series about the life of a deeply religious family, a rare subject for TV dramas today...
...switcheroo is true to history: the killers and would-be killers of Presidents usually did so out of private grief or deranged rage. And it reminds us of something Americans have forgotten as they look outward for their most spectacular villains. The expectation that an Arab/Islamic terrorist would have his finger on the trigger shows how meekly Americans have ceded the top spot in crazy political violence to newcomers from abroad. We have a rich and disgraceful history of political violence in particular and gun violence in general. 9/11 may have changed a lot of things, but it didn...
...tingle his films give his audience, that Shyamalan's exalted position is a little precarious. First, there's the suspicion that, as a storyteller, Shyamalan might be a one-trick pony. O.K., it's a great trick: the notion of dread congealing around some ordinary man, capped by a switcheroo that casts all that preceded it in a darker light. But the surprise ending can restrict an artist. (Ask O. Henry; ask Rod Serling.) If viewers of each new Shyamalan film get a twist, it feels predictable. If they don't, they feel cheated...
...attraction looms, in a LaBute play, pain must follow. It's his theme: that people, people like us, hurt people. He has the craft to ensure they do so instructively and entertainingly. The play wouldn't work as seductively as it does-the set-up, the darkening, the climactic switcheroo-without four beguiling actors who make their characters plausible at the sweetest and harshest of moments. (Rudd is especially adroit at suggesting Adam's metamorphosis from nerd to hunk.) Only at the end do we realize exactly who has been manipulated by a clever artist. We have...
...first of all, is safe. As a parting gift to Bush, Jeffords decreed that his switcheroo would not take effect until after Bush signs what will likely be a $1.35 trillion across-the-board cut that doles out long-term tax relief to each according to his income. But Jeffords, saying if he was going to disagree with Bush so much he might as well make it official, had a pretty long list of what would have been his future treacheries: Health care, energy, missile defense and the environment (not to mention the judiciary, choice, education "and a host...