Word: functional
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Nonetheless, the conventions, as pageants and pep rallies and political institutions, will continue to serve an important function. For all their tedium, their cost and their predictability, they are a vital link between the presidential candidates and the nation in the age of television...
While it does not contain all of the complex data typically published in a regular financial report, the company's first annual report for young people slides through the firm's activities with the grace of a skateboarder. In order to explain the function of the company's fiscal year, the report says: "Imagine that you pointed a paralyzing ray gun at Ashland last September 30 and-ZAP!!-brought all our operations to a complete standstill everywhere...
...characters in Dressed to Kill are not candidates for compassion or figures of raunchy fun. They are animated mannequins-the wandering housewife (Dickinson), the loving son (Keith Gordon), the harried hooker (Allen), the patient psychiatrist (Michael Caine)-whose only function is to attack or be attacked, to play villain or victim. The plot has so many coincidences and contradictions that the moviegoer is left with only one option: to savor Dressed to Kill as an exercise in directorial style...
Rashad al-Shawwa is no radical: he has been the target of terrorist attacks because of his view that Gaza could not function without some kind of cooperation with the occupying Israelis. But at Bir Zeit University, just north of Ramallah in the West Bank, the students' anti-Israeli rhetoric would do credit to a warm-up rally for P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat. Says one 23-year-old student: "We believe in the slogan, 'What has been taken by force must be taken back by force.' Our struggle is part of the universal struggle against imperialism...
...precisely this Chekhovian quality -the rueful romanticism, the generous fatalism, the belief that everyone has his reasons-that permeates the best "approved" Soviet films, and perhaps the spirit of the men and women who make them as well. In the Soviet system, everyone has his function. Some people make films (about 150 features a year from the three major and 20 regional studios). Some people "edit" them (there are often three censors assigned to a production). Some people exhibit them (though theater managers, who have admissions quotas to meet, frequently pair Soviet films with livelier fare from abroad). And some...