Word: present-day
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WHAT really happened in the Tonkin Gulf during the early days of August 1964 is a question that historians may ponder for decades. All the details will probably never be established. For present-day Americans, the knowable facts are of more than academic interest, since the events of those days set off a chain reaction, beginning with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress, which has sent more than a million U.S. troops to battle in South Viet Nam. The following account is based on the Defense Department's official report-much of which was secret until last week...
...this is less an eye-witness report than a very private vision. As Wakefield sees it, present-day U.S. society is so stringently regimented that it is marching inexorably to war. Viet Nam is no aberration: it is U.S. destiny. Readers may draw different conclusions, but in personal journalism, the writer is paid for expressing his emotions-and even fiction is a vital form of human perception...
...until he decides to go home again to revisit his ex-wife and child in the North Country, where he was born. With him is a migratory bird (Liza Minnelli) who has journeyed from America to be his secretary. Their trip rapidly becomes a descent into the hell of present-day materialistic England. Superhighways stretch on into meaningless dark. High-rise buildings hover like demons over the landscape. Friends talk past him, never...
...imperviousness to precedent can provide the viewer with a shock of delight. There are sequences in his films that no other director would have dared to try, or could have brought off half so well: Alphaville's portrayal of the future as nightmare, achieved through location-shooting in present-day Paris; the bittersweet evocations of prewar Hollywood musicals in A Woman Is a Woman; the female mood of sensual boredom in The Married Woman...
...human character, "THX" (pronounced with a lisp). A vision of 1984, it evoked in 15 minutes a future world in which man is enslaved by computers and TV monitors. Although portentous in theme, THX impressed the judges with its technical virtuosity: Lucas shot his future-oriented film entirely in present-day Los Angeles-much as Jean-Luc Godard, one of his cinematic heroes, shot the nightmare-future Alphaville, entirely in contemporary Paris...