Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...would think that even a nation with the U.S.'s uncanny taste for inspirational improbability might be fed up with "Men of Honor." But that may not be so. There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar. The director, George Tillman Jr., either doesn't notice or doesn't give a hoot about the way Scott Marshall Smith's script piles up clichés. He just keeps driving his movie right on through them. What's true of him is true of his actors too. De Niro pitches his performance on the edge of psychopathy...
...neighbor Richard M. Nixon "prowling restlessly around his garden." In a little while a party begins at the Schlesinger house. A guest - invited by a friend of his wife's - comes to the door, a man whom Schlesinger has never met: Alger Hiss. They have a polite chat - even though Schlesinger considers Hiss to be just about as guilty as Nixon said he was long years before...
...Martha's Vineyard with movie stars, the lunches at Manhattan's Mortimer's restaurant with the society crowd). He indulges the old New Deal intellectual's habit of bashing business and businessmen in an almost recreational way. (At one point he blithely equates capitalism with sexism and racism.) But even his smugness has a certain hilarious pungency. He records the time in London toward the end of the war when a V-1 bomb fell close by; everyone else in his office fell to the floor, but as a coworker's journal noted, "Arthur... boldly looked out the window...
There are times when less would not be more, when it would just be regrettably... less. Umberto Eco has argued, for example, that "Casablanca" works because it evokes every convention of the romantic-adventure genre. If it had missed even one or two of them, he suggests, it would have been just another forgettably routine wartime movie...
...real. The idea that Bush is "a uniter, not a divider" or will commit to real progress on leveling the economic, health, and educational playing fields is fallacious. Even if you buy his pledge to go where his political party has not, no one with a divided Congress is uniting much of anything in the next four years, so forget personality and think fitness for office both in terms of foreign policy and the Supreme Court...