The right side of the web has been rife with rememberances
of William F. Buckley, Jr. Too many to link to, so I haven't
tried. But this from Conrad Black is pretty good:
He had one of the largest vocabularies of any English-speaking person in
public life but, I discovered when we and our wives took a cruise
together, was hopeless at Scrabble because he was unaccustomed to using
words of eight letters or less.
I'll have to remember that one the next time I lose at Scrabble.
(Via The Corner.)
Another movie from the Adjective Noun genre.
This one lives up to that low standard.
The story begins with a brief 1980s prologue establishing that
Wilson DeLeon, even though he be a gangster, is a pretty decent
guy, showing mercy to a shopkeeper his minions have been beating on.
Never mind, though, because a few minutes later Wilson
spurns his wife's pleas to stay home and enjoy
the fortune she's laundered for them, is betrayed by his colleagues, and
dies of acute lead poisoning.
We then jump forward to the present day, where Wilson DeLeon, Jr., born
on the day his daddy died,
is presented to us as a serious college student with a hot car and an
even hotter girlfriend. Unfortunately, it turns out (unbeknownst to
Junior) the bad guys have been after him and his mom all this time, for
reasons that will not be made clear until the end of the movie.
The movie is not without its fun moments, but a lot of them
result from the ludicrous plot
and dialogue that ranges between
unbelievable and pointless. (The NYTreview calls it
"telenovela dialogue", which, given the Hispanicity of the cast,
is a dreadful stereotype, but also probably true.)
The movie's bad-guy professional killers
are also probably the most inept to
ever appear in a major movie. Their strategy for locating their targets
is apparently to wander through northeastern US supermarkets and
playgrounds looking
for them; no wonder
it takes twenty years.
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