Word: deadness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last December, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy helped push Congress into passing a provision that seemed to take dead aim at Rupert Murdoch. At the time, Murdoch was benefiting from temporary waivers of a Federal Communications Commission regulation that prohibits a firm from owning a newspaper and a TV station in the same community. The waivers allowed him to continue owning the Herald and WFXT-TV in Boston, and the New York Post and WNYW-TV in Manhattan. But the congressional measure urged by Kennedy forbade the FCC to extend the time period of the waivers that were then in effect...
...Bright Lights, Big City was a cute novel and a polished one when it was all the rage four years ago. Wrapping them up together was not an entirely unreasonable movie-packaging idea. It arrives, however, looking like something that has been kicking around too long in the dead-letter office...
...worst violence since the troubles began in December. Though additional security forces were poured in, thousands of West Bank Palestinians commemorated Land Day by burning tires and attacking soldiers. By week's end, as Christians and Jews began their Easter and Passover observances, 18 more Palestinians had been shot dead by Israeli troops, which raised the toll to 139 in the four-month uprising...
...encourages filmmakers to plunder all the medium's resources, to create something that can exist only in the movies. Check out, for instance, Beetlejuice's vision of the afterlife -- it's hell as a strangled bureaucracy. In the waiting room, where the exit signs read NO EXIT, the dead still carry scars of their demise. A magician's assistant, who has been fatally sawed in half, occupies two seats on a couch. The social worker who runs the place is clearly overworked; she has an alarm on her wristwatch that plays Chopin's Funeral March in ricky-tick time...
Director Tim Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) has some poignant points to make about, well, life: that the dead must teach the living to savor it. Mostly, though, he wants to give good fun, to turn Winter River into West Eastwick, to ransack pop culture for references to everything from Topper to Tiny Alice. And to give Michael Keaton the chance to run productively wild. Keaton's Beetlejuice is a deliciously loathsome creature, whether shouting insults, lunching on insects or, in the film's climactic wedding scene, pulling a ring off a severed, shriveled finger and muttering...