Word: alien
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cannily commercial, Project X has almost too much old gold going for it: strands of The Miracle Worker, Fail Safe, The Elephant Man, Top Gun and the collected works of Steven Spielberg. Like E.T., this is the story of a childlike alien and his lonely human friend who must protect the creature, like a wise father with a brilliant, battered child, and then set it free. But Writers Stanley Weiser and Lawrence Lasker (WarGames) resist nearly every temptation to truckle, and Director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel) finds each scene's emotional core while surrounding it with meticulous technique...
...enchanting Beauty is about as difficult to come by as a formula for magic. Most of the women's roles are difficult and must be carried off with the sort of aristocratic elan that only technically strong performers can muster. The character dances and, above all, the mime are alien to many young performers, particularly Americans. Finally, the overall production needs a beneficent fairy of its own; The Sleeping Beauty is a miracle of scale and symmetry; glitz or vulgarity or plodding pedantry will turn it into a long night indeed...
...youth its scholars are often defensive, since they must not only conduct research, but also prove the validity of their discipline. They argue that male attitudes towards women have, until recently, prevented uniquely female perspectives from joining standard scholarship; as a result, they often have a political perspective alien to the Harvey Mansfields of this world. However, this in itself does not equate Women's Studies with "the study of left-handed people," as Mansfield would have...
...Japanese still look down on resident foreigners. The 700,000 Koreans who constitute Japan's largest alien enclave must overcome legal barriers to obtain citizenship, although many of them were born and bred in Japan during the early part of the century, when Korea was a Japanese colony. The 5,000 Indochinese refugees taken in by Japan after the Viet Nam War find assimilation all but impossible. "Japanese heartily welcome foreigners on short visits," explains Masahiro Tsubouchi of the Tokyo immigration office. "They just don't want them to stay forever...
...sure, as many as 1,000 of the amphibians at first congregated dubiously at the entrance to the tunnel of love, hesitant to make a move. But "after all, a tunnel is a nasty, alien thing," said Society Spokesman John Burton. Once the toads got the hang of it, however, they hopped right through to their assignations...