Word: drilling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...their vacations each summer to spend six weeks brainstorming, studying and trading experiences as they try to devise new methods of getting their pupils to write. Says Dixie Goswami, a Clemson University English professor who heads Bread Loaf's program in writing: "We have nothing against 'skill-and-drill' writing curricula, except they don't work." Instead, Bread Loaf graduates have quietly created one of the nation's most inventive programs to encourage student writers...
Most Republican contenders are going through a mirror image of this drill. To independents and moderates, they talk about compassion as they attempt to disengage from the harsher aspects of Reaganism. But G.O.P. primary voters tend to be conservative loyalists. They want a combative leader who reminds them of Reagan -- or so the candidates think. Reagan's longtime pollster, Richard Wirthlin, cautions that the muscular approach does not work automatically. "People always rerun the last successful election," Wirthlin explains. "Now candidates are trying to bring forward what was a very important trait for Reagan...
...propelled grenades at a U.S.-operated Liberian tanker off the Kuwaiti coast; no casualties were reported. The attacks followed a bout of muscle flexing between the U.S. and Iran. Soon after Iran tested a Chinese-made Silkworm missile at the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy held its own drill, launching planes from a carrier in the Gulf of Oman...
...look sullen or stern. Do they know that this is a pre-op for a lobotomy? Double time, in their eight weeks at Parris Island, S.C., they will be stripped of their freedom, their pride, their names. The recruit who dares to hang some John Wayne sarcasm on the drill instructor will be called Joker (Matthew Modine). The guy from Texas will be dubbed Cowboy (Arliss Howard). Gomer Pyle is the name given to a fat bumpkin (Vincent D'Onofrio) whose dim-witted sanctity begs to be beaten into lean meat. The D.I. (Lee Ermey) will oblige. He will shape...
...this first half of the film is occasionally confused, uncertain whether to portray Pyle as a comic figure or as a troubled man. His sudden psychopathy is barely convincing, because Pyle's getting his act together would have gotten the drill sergeant off his back. Kubrick seems slightly off the mark in portraying the tyrannical nature of the drill sargeant. The sergeant at times seems patriotic to the point of ridicule--tough so he can make his men great in the name of his country--but when he invokes the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald as a great marine worthy...