Word: confect
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...Hoping to zazz up what has been a predictable show with precipitously declining ratings in the U.S. in recent years, the Academy gave the job to producers Bill Condon and Larry Mark, the men behind the Oscar-winning movie Dreamgirls. They commissioned Aussie director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) to confect an elaborate production number proclaiming the Musical Is Back. They also trotted out a retinue of Oscar-winning royalty - Sophia Loren, Shirley MacLaine, Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins - to give individual tributes to the nominees in the acting categories; the ploy was sweet at first but ultimately laborious...
...sees that the missile that did the damage came from Stark Industries. Severely wounded - and kept alive with a car battery wired to his heart - he comes to in the cave of Taliban-like insurgents, whose head-shaved leader (Faran Tahir) would very much appreciate it if Tony could confect a home-made bomb for him. Instead, with the help of a fellow prisoner (Shaun Toub), Tony constructs a heavily armed metal suit, blasts his way out of the cave and resolves to change his nickname from Merchant of Death to semi-pacific Iron Man. "I have more to offer...
...condoned; no woman blithely chose to have a child out of wedlock; abortion (or, as it's delicately alluded to in Knocked Up, "shmuh-shmortion") was not considered, not even discussed. Considering all the strictures on what was allowed in movies, we marvel at the ingenuity of writers to confect situations that satisfied audiences then, and still delight us today, if only in their gleaming artificiality...
...stability of the legal system." If nothing else, that was politically shrewd, since it heartened liberals, who felt he wouldn't set out to unravel every regulation of the past 30 years, but also conservatives, who felt reassured that he wouldn't use a seat on the bench to confect a constitutional right to gay marriage...
...THREAT Thriller writers often confect plots that turn on the poisoning of a city's water supply with a few tablets of some very lethal substance. But while the idea has a long history (Roman legionnaires tossed animal corpses into the water supplies of their enemies), the tactic isn't very practical. Even in high concentrations, germs would probably be quickly diluted in a large reservoir, if not killed off later during chlorination...