Word: alienating
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...today when CNN president Tom Johnson said that CNN is reconsidering its policy of allowing its news anchors to play themselves in movies. CNN had been roundly criticized for appearances by 13 CNN on-air personnel in the movie "Contact" delivering fictional news reports about a message from an alien civilization. Earlier, Shaw had appeared in "The Lost World" reporting that dinosaurs had run amok in San Diego. But "Contact" came under special scrutiny because CNN's parent company, Time Warner, also owns Warner Bros., which produced the film. Johnson said he wasn't pressured to lend his journalists...
...alien" on your cover--with its predictable oversize head and creepy doe eyes--prompted one of my pet peeves: illustrations of extraterrestrial creatures that look just like humans. Get real! We humans are the product of a host of improbable accidents. Science tells us that space and life are weird beyond belief. And so are real aliens. ALAN M. PERLMAN Highland Park...
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Turns out that President Clinton is one of the stars of "Contact," the new Robert Zemeckis film about communicating with an alien civilization, and his attorneys are not amused. The movie twice uses footage of existing Clinton speeches to imply that the President is speaking about a message from the aliens, an extension of a tactic Zemeckis used in "Forrest Gump," where the protagonist was cut into historical footage so that he appeared to be talking to everyone from LBJ to Nixon. Clinton lawyer Charles Ruff says Zemeckis effectively gave the President a role in the film without...
...much for the plot, which is never the strength of a spoof. "MiB" is a patchwork of moments--here, definitely, the parts are greater than the whole. The movie's at its best when poking fun at the tabloid culture that thrives on alleged alien sightings. Supermarket tabloids are the real news sources for the MiB (quips Jones: "you can read the New York Times if you like, they sometimes get it right"). The story of a farm wife, Beatrice (appropriately illustrated with an adapted copy of "American Gothic"), who claims that an alien's wearning her husband Edgar...
Perhaps the best thing about "Men in Black"--besides Danny Elfman's deliciously campy score--is its ending sequence, in which Earth is visually reduced to an alien's plaything. This and occassional lines from Jones referring to Earth as a little backwater planet almost smack of Douglas Adams. Too bad he didn't have a hand in writing the script...