Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Teaching is funny. Children are not cute. They are dumb, and that is funny. When I was teaching sex-ed to the sixth grade, there were plenty of questions such as this one: "If an alien came down to Chicago and had sex with a person, what would their children be like?" This, after we finished Macbeth...
...quiz in a course I hadn't taken. The sets were Formica, the characters cardboard; the tale had drive but no depth, a tour at warp speed through an antiseptic landscape. I admired George Lucas' attention to detail, his Tolkien-like industry in creating a host of alien life-forms, but I remained unmoved. Peering at Star Wars through the telescope of my disinterest, I made this fearless box-office prediction: "The movie's 'legs' will prove as vulnerable...
...holiday dinner. Some 40 films are on view, many as solemn as a Christmas sermon; we consider 10 here. Three are docudramas about challenges to the legal system. Three are tales of senior citizens in decay or defiance. Another three are comic studies of dire events: serial killing, an alien invasion, going home to mother. And it wouldn't be Christmas without a film of some masterwork by a 19th century novelist; this year it's Henry James. Below, a few reasons to visit your local plex--and a few more to stay home with the Yule...
...there was a lot to reward a scrappy faith in human persistence. Amid a flotilla of alien invasions, The English Patient brought David Lean-like scope and passion back to the Cineplex. Still laboring under Khomeini's fatwa, Salman Rushdie produced what may be his greatest novel. A rock update of La Boheme brought the Broadway musical resoundingly into the '90s. The Fugees proved you can sell millions of rap records without gangsta's toxicity, while Tiger Woods broadened golf's horizons simply by showing up. And Jerry Seinfeld stayed funny, defying sitcomic entropy. So here...
...with two hugely popular stars, Houston's singing and Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own) behind the camera will transcend color. "The biggest movies of all time have always defied conventional wisdom," he argues. Houston finds it discouraging that race is still an issue. "What's so alien about us?" she asks. "I don't understand why there's such a big thing about all-black casts. I've seen movies with all-white casts...It's a movie. Either you like...