Word: alienation
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...fields - not exactly a sea of poppies, but plenty of them. It was two weeks before the harvest, and the last blossoms were floating away in the dusty haze of Helmand province, leaving the prohibitively weird-looking, blue-gray bulbs bald and ready for processing, like an army of alien vegetative creatures. We landed in a wheat field just across the road from the district governor's pathetic headquarters. It was Day 45 after the operation to retrieve Marjah from the Taliban had begun, and the highest-ranking U.S. military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs...
...year old niece Harriet 40 years ago on a remote island. Henrik believes Harriet was killed by a member of her large and thoroughly nasty family and he wants Blomkvist to figure out whodunit. Salander ends up helping Blomkvist and falling for him, although the concept of love is alien to her; she's so anti-social that Blomkvist speculates she has Asperger Syndrome...
Heavy subject matter isn't the only thing that sets children's-film-festival offerings apart from their commercial cousins at the multiplex. NYICFF is also showing Fantastic Planet, which comes with a classic caveat for parents about "non-explicit alien nuptials." Mai Mai Miracle depicts third-graders and a toddler getting wasted on liqueur-filled chocolates. In The Old Lady and the Pigeons, there's an attempt at cannibalism. These are films for parents who prefer to expose their children to dystopia, dysfunction and dissolution rather than to Disney. (See pictures of animated movies...
...offs. (Romero's latest film, Survival of the Dead, may go direct to video.) The Crazies - about people whose minds are poisoned by the town's water supply - wasn't quite so trailblazing. It built on that potent science-fiction trope, the takeover of personality by an alien entity, that dates back to Philip K. Dick's 1954 story "The Father-Thing," in which an eight-year-old suspects that his father's not quite right and finds a menacing replicant in the garage. A year later, Jack Finney fleshed out the premise in his novel The Body Snatchers...
...Storm King Art Center Stretching west of the Hudson River for about 200 hectares, this mammoth park is big enough to justify the tram tours. Notable works include Alexander Calder's The Arch, a fearsome structure that looks like something left behind by alien visitors, and Louise Nevelson's City on the High Mountain - a piece in black steel that abstractly suggests an urban dystopia and might remind visiting Manhattanites not to hurry home. More details at www.stormking.org...