Word: angellic
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German cinema has given the world a cast of characters as varied as the diabolical Dr. Caligari and the sultry chanteuse of Blue Angel. But none was ever quite like the film heroine that has recently drawn West German audiences to the movies in droves-Christiane F.: We Children from the Zoo Station. The protagonist starts off as a teen-age prostitute and drug addict who haunts the squalid fringes of West Germany's affluent society. On the screen, when she is not listening to David Bowie tapes in the labyrinthine subway corridors of the station near Berlin...
...owners of the Finca Florencia, the powerful family that built the plantation is still a ghostly presence. They revere the memory of Angel, the patriarch who founded the finca in the late 1880s and built the big rustic house with its brick pillars and its view reaching from tin-roofed barns to stone walls enclosing acre after acre of lush coffee bushes. For 60 years, the plantation prospered under Angel and his grandson Carlos. Then Carlos turned over the Finca Florencia to his four sons, and by the 1950s the farm was in the hands of a hired manager...
...less and less for the campesinos. Finally the owners stripped the plantation, shipping out the fertilizer, selling off the cattle, dismantling the machinery. When land reform came to the Finca Florencia, as Ehrlich put it, "all we had to give to the campesinos was the land itself." Now Angel's legacy-the fertile, volcanic soil as well as the shuttered house, the cracked, weed-filled swimming pool and the primitive courtyard workrooms-belongs to the great-grandchildren of those who labored to build them...
...MERLIN--the real central character of this film--Nicol Williamson thoroughly enjoys himself, savoring his every line with a sly insouciance. With an amazing array of inflections and twitches. Williamson makes his wizard a peculiar combination of magician, clown, and guardian angel. His consistent brilliance gives the film its only consistency...
Inside, Mr. Ed Hoffman, "the singing usher" from the Angel's Anaheim Stadium and the father of Red Sox shortstop Glenn Hoffman, sings the national anthem accompanied by the muzak of the park organ. Afterwards, Mrs. Eleanor "Stoney" Stone, who the scoreboard calls "a long time Red Sox fan," a mother of nine and a grand-mother of ten, throws out the first ball to Red Sox cathcher Gary Allenson. Someone in the stands yells, "Put her in the bullpen...