沈阳工业大学硕士英语精读血钻.docx

Unit.2 Fighting the Power
1. On the off chance you do not already have enough on your plate, here’s another hot-button, topic to worry about: conflict diamonds. The Leonardo DiCaprio thriller, Blood Diamond, tackles the issue of raw gems that were mined at gunpoint (or worse) to fuel the decimating guerrilla wars of Sierra Leone. Directed by Edward Zwick, the film, set in 1999, is a lavish big-scale production, with scenes of eye-opening carnage—young men getting their hands chopped off—as well as world-jewel-market lessons that tick across the screen with grim intrigue . And there is DiCaprio as a cucumber-cool South African mercenary who befriends a fisherman-turned-forced diamond worker, plus Jennifer Connelly as a Vanity Fair reporter. “You think you are going to change the outcome?” barks DiCaprio to the swank, do-gooder journalist. “You sell blood diamonds too!” An accusation she quickly dodges by declaring “Not all American girls want a storybook wedding!”
1. 有可能你并没有占用很多时间关心这个热门话题：血钻。莱昂纳多·迪卡普里奥的惊悚片，血钻，讲述了为了给富力塞拉利昂游击战争提供燃料而在枪口下开采原宝石的过程。由爱德华·兹威克执导的该电影于1999年上映，场面洪大，充满让人目瞪口呆的屠杀场面——年轻人的手被砍断——以及用可怕的阴谋在屏幕上展现出来的世界珠宝市场的教训。影片中，迪卡普里奥是一个冷酷的唯利是图的南非商人，他和一个被迫成为血钻工人的渔夫是朋友，再加上珍妮弗·康纳利是一个名利场记者。“你认为你能够改变结果吗？” 迪卡普里奥向“不切实际”的记者咆哮，“你也在卖血钻！” 珍妮弗躲避他的指控说道“不是每个美国女孩都想要一个童话般的婚礼的！”
2. In 2006, that is a startling statement for a political drama to hang its case on. I mean, really, how many American girls do not want a storybook wedding? (Enough to make this movie a hit? ) Even prior to its release on Dec.8, Blood Diamond has touched a nerve at De Beers, the international diamond conglomerate, which launched a PR campaign renouncing, and denying the purchase of all conflict diamonds. Yet in today’s frazzled, fraught, nervously consumerist environment, it is worth asking how much attention any moviegoer, overwhelmed by health care, the housing market, the technotoys they have to buy their kids, not to mention such trivialities as the war in Iraq, is going to have let to devote to yet another issue: making sure they buy 10000 jewels, if they can afford them, from enlightened mining zones.
2. 2006年，政治剧上榜是一个惊人的声明。我的意思是，事实上，有多少美国女孩不想要教科书式的童话婚礼？（足以使这部电影给人心里一击？）即使在12月8日电影发行之前，血钻鼓起勇气，在国际珠宝公司De Beers开展了一项公关运动，公开宣布并否认采购血钻。然而，在如今疲惫、压力大、忧虑、崇尚消费主义的环境下，经常看电影的观众需要重视医疗水平、住房市场、必须给孩子买的高科技玩具等，都不要提伊拉克战争这样的小事，还有多少注意力能够剩余来关注另一个问题：如果他们能够负担得起，他们花费10000美元买来的钻石是来源于开明的开采区。
3. I did not use to have these thoughts, this testy skepticism, about topical liberal message movies. Likely a lot of people, I went to such high-minded and urgently timely rabble-rousers as Z or Norma Roe or All the President’s Men or Silkwood or Salvador or Erin Brockovich and got riled up, inspired, or simply entertained by them, taking in the gutbucket nobility of what they were saying——the protests against intolerance ,greed, corporate malfeasance, political corruption, and so forth. Of course, many of these movies deal with evens that have already passed, and so they can scarcely be expected to change things. More and more, though, the films that arrive with a timely message——at least, the ones that are not documentaries——often seem to be released into a cultural vacuum of indifference.
3. 我过去没有这些想法，关于自由寓意电影的怀疑想法。跟很多人一样，我去看一些高尚的、具有时效性、煽动性的影片，Z、Norma Roe、All the President’s Men、Silkwood、Salvador、Erin Brockovich等的时候会生气、受到鼓舞，或者仅仅被影片娱乐，领会、理解影片最原始的表达——对无法容忍之事、贪婪、不法企业、政治腐败等的抗议、抗争。当然，这些影片所述的是已经过去的事件，所以他们几乎不期望有所改变。然而，越来越多的电影以及时的信息到达——至少，那些不是纪录片——他们看起来被释放成一种冷漠的文化真空。
4. Unless I am forgetting something, I do not recall The Interpreter, that Nicole Kidman United Nations thriller, stirring up a lot of overheated coffee-bar conversation about the role of the U.N in the post-9/11 world, and ditto for North Country and the issue of sexual harassment. True, neither of those films was particularly good, but I’d pose the same question of effectiveness, of zeitgeist heat, in relation to The Constant Gardener, a splendidly made conspiracy thriller that did a scrupulous job of dramatizing the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to exploit AIDS in Africa for profit. Did it stimulate dialogue about , or alter the actions of, Big Pharma by one-tenth of a degree? And if not, did its message really mean anything? Was it all just hot air in a prestige Oscar bottle?
4. 我依然还记得，《议员风波》这部国际化的惊悚片，关于联合国在911事件中扮演的角色在普通人中激起了很激烈的讨论，同样激起热烈讨论的还有关于性骚扰的《北方风云》。事实上，这两部影片都不是特别好的电影，但是我还是会对影片《执着的园丁》提出相同的关于时效性、时代精神等问题。《执着的园丁》是一部制作精良的有关阴谋的惊悚小说，夸张的讲述了非洲一家严谨的制药公司开发AID药品盈利的故事。它真的刺激了相关讨论，或者改变了十分之一程度大制药公司的行为吗，如果不是，影片信息真的有意义吗，还是它只是获取了奥斯卡奖项的威望呢？
5. The question seems relevant as we enter another holiday movie season, with big-message pictures an inevitable part of the awards smorgasbord. The funny thing is, these movies now arrive with a wary, almost daunted sense of their potential irrelevance. In Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, a group of young folks, fed up with the corruption underlying the American fast food industry, decide to get off their duffs and do something. One suggests writing a letter of protest, at which point the cool rebel guy, the one with the long hair and wool cap, out of Dosed and Confused, steps forward. A letter? He scoffs. What ‘s needed, he says, is action. So the kids devise a plan to hit the corporation where it lives. Yet an overtone of awkwardness ripples though this mad-as-hell moment, since it raises an important question about the movie we are watching. Is Fast Food Nation going to rouse anyone to action? Or is it just the cinematic equivalent of that woebegone letter, the one destined to have no effect at all?
5. 这个问题似乎与我们看到的另一个假期电影季相关，具有较大寓意的电影必不可少的成为大杂烩奖项中的一项。有趣的是，这些电影的潜在意义发展的比较谨慎，几乎无济于事。在Richard Linklater的《快餐帝国》中，一群厌恶美国快餐产业潜在腐败的年轻人想要站出来做些什么。其中一人建议写一封抗议信，而与此同时，《年少轻狂》中一个梳长发、戴羊毛帽子的叛逆少年站出来嘲笑到，一封信？现在所需要的是行动。因而，这群年轻人设计了一个击倒公司的计划。然而，令人尴尬的影片话外音使这个极具疯狂的时刻生出波澜，因为它提出了关于我们看电影的一个重要的问题。《快餐帝国》将会唤醒人们的行动吗？还是那只是令人悲伤的电影版的等同物，注定没有效果呢？
6. You can see what the makers of these movies are going for, in their messianic Hollywood zeal. They must figure that if a book or a magazine article or a page-10 news story can spotlight an issue, how much more power might be derived from transforming that reportage into a vast “important” drama with major marquee names. Yet it is the transformation that may be the problem. It implies that the issues at stake are castor oil, that they need to be taken with a screenful of colorful-global-thriller sugar to make the medicine go down. Audiences, by now, are too aware of the cliches: the selfish heroes who wake up and learn how to care, the cover-ups that tilt into violence, the last-act triumph over the System.
6. 你能够发现电影制作者在他们的救世主好莱坞王国中试图达到的目的。他们必须计算出是否一个剧本、杂志或是一个10页的新闻稿能够获得观众的眼球，把报告改编成更“重要”的电影能够获得多大的影响力。但是，改编过程也许会出现问题的。影响成败的问题多如蓖麻油，只有全屏的全球化的多姿多彩的惊悚小说能够解决。观影观众们现在都比较陈词滥调：觉醒并学习如何关心他人的自私的英雄、暴力事件中掩盖丑闻的手段、战胜体制的最后一幕。
7. Ironically, the Hollywood message movie may have revealed its weary bones in Erin Brockovich (2000), a good and popular film. In that toxic-waste corporate rouser, director Steven Soderbergh treated the message movie as a genre, pure and simple, as formatted as a Western. You could root for Julia Roberts, in her bustiers, to fight the power without worrying about what the power was. Tellingly, that same year, Soderbergh also made the brilliant Traffic, the rare topical film that spins the texture of an issue into drama, though in hindsight the question of whether that movie had even a ripple effect upon American drug-war policy remains in serious doubt.
7. 十分讽刺的是，好莱坞电影在2000年一部非常好而且十分著名的电影《永不妥协》中透露了其疲惫的框架。导演Steven Soderbergh将那部排放有毒废物公司传达寓意的电影处理成单纯简单、模式化的西部影片。你可以支持Julia Roberts一样的人，不担心何为权利而向权利发起斗争。但有效的是, 同一年，Soderbergh还制作了一部非常精彩的《毒品网络》，那是一部很稀有的将问题本质融入影片的纪实电影。虽然后来该影片对美国药品政策是否产生一点影响力依然存在较大怀疑。
8. To be fair, only a handful of topical dramas have ever had much resonant effect. The overlapping slew of cover-up thrillers that dotted the mid-1970s(three days of the condor, the parallax view, the conversation ) helped the public connect to the revelations of Watergate. JFK generated headlines and more: Oliver Stone’s electric tapestry of conspiracy provoked dozens of articles in The New York Times, and the curiosity about the Kennedy assassination it rekindled was instrumental in getting Congress to open sealed files in the event. It is worth noting that the first blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation(1915), was an incendiary message movie, and so, in its cornball-storybook way, was Casablanca(1942), released at the height of World War 2, in which Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, conquering his apathy in the face of the war, learned that the problems of two people do not amount to a hill of beans.
8. 公平的说，只有少数时事影片能够引发共鸣。19世纪70年代中期涌现的一些相似框架的恐怖片（英雄不流泪、视差、窃听大阴谋等）帮助公众联系到新闻报道中产生的肯尼迪水门事件等：Oliver Stone关于阴谋的摄影影片激起纽约时报大量文章涌现，被影片唤醒的观众对肯尼迪暗杀事件的好奇使在国会在重大事项时开放密封文件。值得注意的是，第一部轰动的影片《一个国家的诞生》（1915）是一部极具煽动性的寓意影片，同样走悲伤故事路线的影片还有1942年的《卡萨布兰妮》，讲述第二次世界大战期间的释放。影片中Humphrey Bogart’s Rick战胜了战争的冷漠，认识到两个民族关系问题的重要性。
9. Woodrow Wilson said The Birth of a Nation was “writing history with lightning”, but has any scripted drama from the last three decades had as lighting an effect upon the national discourage as Falirenheit 9/11? Whatever one’s opinion of Michael Moore, he has proven that American moviegoers are hunger for confrontation, information, an immediate mirror of their times far more than they are for tidy liberal homilies served up in melodramatic form. Super Size Me proved that too—and so did Al Gore with the bracing dialogue-in-coffee-bar-provoking, An Inconvenient Truth. In general, the rise of documentaries as a mainstream entertainment form may turn out to be the single biggest nail in the topical-message-movie coffin.
9. Woodrow Wilson说，《一个国家的诞生》“闪亮的书写了历史”但是关于最近300年内编写的戏剧是否像激起民族反应的《华氏911》一样产生了一些闪亮的作用呢？无论Michael Moore的观点是什么，他证明了美国观众渴望对抗、信息、及时反应时代胜过于整齐、自有、夸张的戏剧表现形式。《超码的我》也证明了这一点，同样证明这一点的还有《难以忽视的真相》戈尔和被激怒的支持对话沟通的观众。一般说来，以娱乐主流形式逐渐上升的纪录片结果被证明成为时事影片棺材上的最后一颗钉子。
10. It boils down to this: we now live in a reality-based media culture that bombards us with advocacy. Book-length exposes. Cable news. Talk radio. The 24/7 information stream that is the Internet. When something occurs like, say, the Enron scandal, it is reported on and dissected from every angle. But let us imagine Hollywood decided to make a movie about Enron, embedding that scandal in a story, giving us a hero with a newly awakened conscience, a romance to make us “care”. In doing so, a movie about the consequences of lying would itself be based on a lie: that those things matter as much as the scandal. And that they amount to more than a hill of beans.
10. 归根结底：我们如今生存在一个以事实为根据的媒体文化中，被灌输着自由、自主的思想。文章评述，有线电视新闻，访谈听说，每天24小时、每周七天流动着的所有都是信息。当有一些事情，比如有丑闻发生时，事件将会进行持续报导并被从各个角度被解读。但是，请我们试想好莱坞决定制作一部关于丑闻的影片，将丑闻孕育在一个故事中，给我们展现一个觉醒的英雄，一个浪漫的故事，让我们关心、关注。这样做的结果是，这部关于谎言的影片本身就是基于一个谎言：那些发生的事情和丑闻过程一样。并且他们也很重要。

Unit.2
Vocabulary
1. In the past, there has been controversy 争议 over the fact that Michael Fawcett made a business selling unwanted Royal gifts. The (revelations)曝光 led to him resigning and being nicknamed Fawcett the Fence.
2. National spotlight 国民聚焦
3. Sexual harassment and racial discrimination
4. Student numbers have been decimated by cuts in grants 助学金
5. The zeitgeist时代精神 of these centuries operated against the development of a pure science.
6. It is easy to criticize others when you have the wisdom of hindsight事后诸葛亮.
7. Album is a smorgasbord 大杂烩 of different musical styles.
8. Then they were （enlightened） 突发奇想 with the creative idea of wrapping包装 the piglets in tiger skins.
9. One question has intrigued art lovers around the world for generations.
10. The German industrial （conglomerate） 大企业 said in mid-December that its investigations had found 50RMB in suspicious怀疑 payment.
1. 倾倒 Bombard = shower
2. 渴望 be hungry for = yearn for
3. 支持 root for = side with
4. 有助于 be instrumental in = contribute to
5. 转变 tilt = convert
6. 厌倦 fed up with = sick of
7. 恼怒 rile up = enrage
8. How much attention is any moviegoer going to have left to devote to making sure they buy 1000RMB from enlightened mining zones?
启蒙文明 enlightened = civilized
9. 冲突 conflict = clashing
10. 暴露 expose = uncover