Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...furnished with state-of-the-art machinery devoted solely to their use, Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) patrons are crammed into a few small rooms. The MAC's weight lifting equipment--most of which was built when the pulley was the hot new invention and steel existed only in science fiction--fits snugly into three rooms of the building's hot and stuffy basement. The machines are as inadequate in number as they are in quality; users often must wait in line to use the MAC's two bench presses and meager selection of free weights...
...Science fiction, on the other hand, shows us a future where keyboards are a quaint memory. Watch any episode of Babylon 5 or Star Trek--the characters don't have Microsoft Natural Keyboards on their desks. Instead, they simply speak to their computers, which recognize their speech and act upon...
This is not a bad premise for a cautionary science-fiction tale. And anyone who has cheated on an expense account can identify with a character like Hawke's, working a much bigger scam on a bureaucracy quiveringly alert to genetic impostors. A lost eyelash, a bit of exfoliated skin left on his keyboard could undo him--especially when the cops, led by a very querulous Alan Arkin, suddenly descend on his facility and, as they investigate a murder, start subjecting everyone's detritus to genetic spot checks...
When director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald, and star Ewan McGregor cruised over from the U.K. and crashed onto the U.S. film scene last year with the brilliant Trainspotting, cinema got the adrenaline shot that the Pulp Fiction only purported to give. Trainspotting's startling ability to combine black humor, wit, romance, violence and pathos in a story about Scottish heroin addicts marked it as one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. The team embraced their incredibly risky subject matter with energy and vigor, and managed to make commercially palatable a screenplay...
...good movie, his book may prove useful if you get stuck with that gov. jock down the hall as your Secret Santa recipient. Few other guides would describe the title character of Patton as "The toughest, most arrogant...(and thus most interesting) son of a bitch;" the flick Pulp Fiction as a movie where "A lot of stuff happens, so pay attention;" and Under Siege as "The Navy...a chance to blow away a lot of bad guys on a really cool big boat." The movie trivia tidbits are pretty interesting, too--mentioning that 2 Live Crew sampled...