Word: alienates
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Play it Again, Sam. This is many people's favorite Woody Alien picture, probably because it is the most polished, conventional, sit-commy movie that he's made. People want a screen persons for Allen, to fit into the preconception that our favorites must be constants (Grouche, Fields Doris Day). So Alien becomes the schiap-master, packaged and ready for some USC Film Thesis in 1998, "Woody Alien Neurotic as American Hero," Pretty Soon we may want to cuddle him to death. Play it Again, Sam comes from Alien's earlier days (it was a Broadway play) when he needed...
...Steve McQueen on Devil's Island--ten million dollar's worth of a dark screen. a few cockroaches, and no talking. I remember last summer, caught in a miserable little movie called The Terminal Man (from Michael Crichton, with George Segal), finding myself watching the Man (who has an alien machine brain lobotomized into his skull so that his actions are uncontrollable) chased at the end to a cemetery, the Man Writhing at the bottom of an open deepsunk grave in agony while a helicopter hovers above training high-powered rifles at him helpless in the pit, shooting him full...
Faisal had a reverence for desert ways, and strove mightily to keep alien influences from corrupting his kingdom. He had seen it founded, after all, out of a backward region of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1932 his crusty father, Ibn Saud, after a series of skirmishes that ended in his defeat of Sherif Hussein of Mecca (great-grandfather of Jordan's present King Hussein), established the kingdom. Ibn Saud had 36 sons but he took an early liking to Faisal, partly because the youth displayed a notable fighting spirit and an ability to carry out his father's orders...
...movie is mostly about the corruption of a good young cop: how his idealism is twisted and turned against him. Done with the sort of street intelligence apparently alien to everyone involved with Report to the Commissioner, such a theme could have made a strong movie. As played-badly-by Michael Moriarty, Beauregard ("Bo") Lockley is less a cop of high principle than one of low IQ. With no perceptible help from Director Milton Katselas (Forty Carats), Moriarty cooks up a caricature of a sad-sack flatfoot, slow on the draw and even slower on wit. Although excuses are supplied...
...starling is not the only alien species that plagues the nation. There are European pigeons, which spread a form of meningitis and defile monuments and building ledges and the German carp, a "wonderfish" imported in the 1870s, which has displaced native game fish from lakes and rivers by eating their food and their spawn. New threats come from the exotic species that escaped from rare-animal or fish farms: the ill-tempered Asian walking catfish, the South American piranha and India's citrus fruit-eating red-whiskered bulbul -to mention just a few. They prove over and over again...