Word: alienations
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...form that's blossoming on the Net: sudden narrative. Like the early experiments in film, sudden narratives consist of quick visual bites that are perfect for today's limited technology and attention spans. Twenty-second-long cartoons--like those on Doodie.com or the one with the cabaret-singing alien doing I Will Survive who gets killed by a falling disco ball--now get e-mailed around the way Seinfeld jokes were once exchanged at the water cooler...
...City auteur Devin Crowley, 32, joined an unprecedented swell of self-financed filmmakers at this year's Sundance Festival. Actually, he didn't get into Sundance. So he screened at No Dance, an all-digital video Sundance imitator held at a nearby mall. Crowley's movie, Show Me the Aliens!!!, was yet another mockumentary, this one about alien abductions...
Mission isn't the space disaster its reviews suggest. It does dawdle over the astronauts' troubles on Earth, and the music smothers emotions it should underscore. One also wonders why an alien intelligence eager for interplanetary contact would kill off the first humans it encounters ("Sorry, wrong number"--ka-boom!). But the film hits its stride with a space-station jitterbug at zero gravity and a desperate stab at lassoing a bucking bronco of a resupply module in outer space. At the end there is real emotional grandeur in a meeting of minds across the galaxy. This...
...found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines as "No one could miss their murderous feuding...
...freely. Some rights were not explicitly detailed but have nonetheless come to be expected. Among these "implied" liberties are the right to privacy and the right not to get hit in the ass with a cricket bat when you forget your gym clothes. Some of Harvard's international students, alien to these precepts of democratic society, endured such unseemly punishments during their high school careers. And they would do it again...