Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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John Travolta and Tom Cruise may be just pop-culture icons to you and me, but in Germany their faith in the preachings of science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard is politically taboo; Scientology is deemed not a religion but a suspect movement whose activities verge on the dangerous edges of extremism. Now Germany's stern attitudes are raising something of an international ruckus, fueled in equal parts by the assertive Church of Scientology, Hollywood luminaries and a U.S. government caught with conflicting objectives...
BRUCE HANDY, who wrote this week's Star Wars cover story, was a 12-year-old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area when he saw his first George Lucas film, the 1971 science-fiction feature THX-1138. So when the story called for spending a day at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, he jumped at the chance to interview his boyhood hero and watch him put the finishing touches on the "special edition" rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy. Handy remembers well when the original film came out in 1977. "I must have seen it five times...
This juxtaposition--what should be done set against the difficulty of actually doing it--underscores the comic principle that animates Hecht's first collection of fiction. Her narrator ought to be happy, or at least fulfilled. She and her architect husband have an apartment in Manhattan, a house in East Hampton and a summer rental on Nantucket. She can afford a small army of expensive people--psychiatrists, opticians, periodontists, endodontists, exercise trainers, floor renovators--to minister to her and her possessions' needs. Yet in spite of all this--or perhaps because of it--she is a psychological wreck...
...already brilliant development of characters and scenes, Williams forged a musical imprint into the minds of moviegoers everywhere. Star Wars: A New Hope reinstills what the original soundtrack embodied and gives a whole new generation the opportunity to discover the magic of Williams' music and the greatest science fiction epic of all time...
...creators, Lucas builds his universe with broad strokes, providing a comprehensive visual and narrative world even though we do not know such specifics as the nature of the Rebels' true cause, the story behind the Clone Wars, or the scope of the Empire. He also assimilates mythology, pulp science fiction, and popular dramatic conventions into his story and makes them his own. Good and evil are starkly contrasted in a satisfying, traditional fashion. The love triangle between Han, Leia, and Luke, though trite, is boldly left unresolved and becomes more interesting in light of what we learn in the later...