Word: facing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cooler than the surrounding gases, the sunspots were visible as dark blemishes on the fiery surface. Just as astronomers were turning their attention to the mottled region, a bright spot suddenly appeared in its midst. It spread like a prairie wildfire, glowing white hot on the sun's yellow face and quickly expanding to cover hundreds of thousands of square miles. The monster blotch was an unusually large solar flare, a stupendous explosion that belched radiation and billions of tons of matter far into space...
Sunspots tend to travel in pairs or groups of opposite polarity, like the ends of horseshoe magnets poking through the solar surface. During one eleven- year cycle, as the blemishes traverse the face of the sun in an east-west direction, the leading spots of each group in the northern hemisphere will generally have positive polarity, the trailing spots negative. In the southern hemisphere, the leading spots will be negative. During the next cycle, the hemisphere polarities will reverse. On average, then, 22 years will pass between solar maximums of the same sunspot polarity. This suggests to many astronomers that...
This is a Keaton familiar from earlier comedies like Beetlejuice. He gets to deliver only a few amusing lines--notably in a scene with Vale and newspaper reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wohl)--but he delivers them well. And Keaton has a beautifully expressive face; he's fun to watch when the script supports him. Sadly, however, it seldom does...
...once he dons his rubber and leather bat costume, Keaton is something else again. His face, hidden behind a black rubber mask, is almost expressionless. His voice, somewhere between a rasp and a whisper, reveals almost no emotion. It is easy to understand why the people of Gotham are afraid of him--early sightings of the superhero describe a six-foot bat who drinks human blood. Keaton does his best to make Batman a creature of the supernatural...
Where Batman appears dark and impenetrable, his nemesis the Joker (Jack Nicholson) is just the opposite. Nicholson wears a bright orange and purple suit that stands out from the Gotham cityscape. Dressed like that, the Joker is not about to disappear into the fog. And Nicholson's face, wrenched into a permanent parody of a grin (the result of being dropped, by Batman, into a vat of toxic chemicals), is a perfect complement to Keaton's expressionless mask...