Word: boned
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since that chance discovery in the summer of 1974, the Love homestead has become a landmark in North American paleontology. In seven years of excavation, Webb and his students have dug up-from what has been dubbed the Love Bone Bed-bits and pieces of more than 100 species of animals, many of them long extinct. All date back to the late Miocene epoch, about 9 million years ago. Among the finds: saber-toothed tigers, four-tusked mastodons, a giant camel some 18 ft. high, an extinct raccoon as big as a bear, various ancient horses and dogs...
Many of the bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising...
STILL, it's obvious that Passer could have made a thriller. He clearly has the talent. It's clear too, that he could have made a "relationship" piece about Cutter and Bone and Mo. When Bone and Mo finally do sleep together while Cutter's off playing detective, the entire scene is filled with such delicacy--never in a film has there been a better exploration of unfaithfulness with all its anticlimactic manifestations--that it's clear Passer is something of a visionary. Or more importantly, he's a visionary without epic pretensions. Perhaps it's his intent all along...
...first remarkable thing about this film is it's air of lazy progress. Cutter and Bone know each other so well that very little is set up in the usual Hollywood ways. In some respects, they have no sacred cows--Cutter's cynicism gives him the leeway to breach any subject, from the sexual tension between him, a cripple, Bone, the stud, and Maureen, the long-suffering wife, and yet still stay within the realm of a "joke." Cutter is immensely likable, immensely smart, and you realize that what's different here is that very rarely have we seen characters...
...some ways, though, Passer ends up working against himself. For beneath the relationships between the three protagonists, the plot grinds on, involving a murder that Bone has been a partial witness to. Bone suspects that a wealthy oil man mighthave done the slaying, and Cutter--claiming the world is short on heroes and with the victims's sister as an accomplice--sets out to ensnare, via blackmail, the oil man. All of this is seen through Bone's eyes, and the uncertainty he has about his own testimony makes the who whodunit air tenuous. Maybe it's all just Cutter...