Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat (plot device lifted from Elmore Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky), and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. As Riggs tells Murtaugh, "We're back! We're bad! You're black! I'm mad!" Mad to the max. Riggs may not know how to spell apartheid, but he knows whom he hates...
...problems she sets herself. She never explains why Susan and Dinah argue, or why each responds to the fight the way she does. Dinah's loneliness leads to her new relationship with Itzak, a renowned flautist. But this development seems almost a non sequitur to the rest of the plot. So does the affair between Laurie and Jimmy, who have been friends since childhood...
...Piercy's occasional eloquence and skillful dialogue cannot compensate for Summer People's basic flaw: the lack of an interesting plot. The novel is engrossing enough for a beachside read, but in comparison to Piercy's earlier works, like Small Changes and Braided Lives, it disappoints. Those novels painted likeable, complex charcters, but Summer People offers only shadows of real people, moving in patterns too familiar to be truly interesting...
...scenes, set in the land of some randy, warlike Pasha, the Soviets seemed to have unwound their every bolt of gaudy cloth. No fewer than five composers are credited with contributing to the noisy score; the choreography, some of it by Marius Petipa, is strictly cut and paste; the plot went down with the ship. But Le Corsaire provides the occasion for some florid dancing, especially in the hands of bravura technicians like Tatyana Terekhova and Farukh Ruzimatov or a poet on point like Altynai Asylmuratova, the company's reigning ballerina...
...center the plot on a drug ring? Simple. Drugs are fashionable, and they make an easy target. And it proabably is no coincidence that Licence to Kill carries a disclaimer in its credits, warning of the dangers of smoking. The new James Bond target is every kind of personal vice. God save us from spies with social consciences, particularly ones who open fire on their enemies in crowded bars filled with reasonably innocent people who just want to get away from their troubles...