Word: films
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Giacconi recalled last week, the problem entailed getting enough X-ray particles to fall on a detector and create an image, like light (in the form of "photons") hitting film in a camera. Giacconi saw that by positioning mirrors at shallow angles to the incoming radiation, astronomers could collect X-rays over a large area and funnel them onto a small detector, allowing for photographs "a millionfold" more detailed than previously possible...
Alien may prove to be Hollywood's most efficient moneymaking machine of the summer. Technically slick and commercially singleminded, this film attempts to crossbreed the scare tactics of Jaws with the sci-fi hardware of Star Wars. The result is a cinematic bastard, and a pretty mean bastard at that. Alien contains a couple of genuine jolts, a barrage of convincing special effects and enough gore to gross out children of all ages. What is missing is wit, imagination and the vaguest hint of human feeling. Luckily for Alien's creators, such ingredients are not really essential...
...youth in revolt against family, society, culture, religion-everything that formed him. But of course it is not the familiar tale Joyce told, but the manner in which he told it, that compels one's attention and awe. And there is simply no way to construct a film that can contain more than a suggestion of the verbal richness of a novel. Interior monologues lose their power when they are transformed into voice-overs or dialogue scenes. Those long, obsessive scenes in which Stephen Dedalus flexes his revolutionary's muscles in aesthetic and theological debate with school friends...
Indeed, if translating Joyce to film appears, on the face of it, an impossible (and perhaps unnecessary) dream, it also seems that Strick, whose camera technique may be charitably described as primitive, is the wrong man to attempt the task. More than a decade ago, he gave us a Ulysses that suffered from the same dull defects. But there are, at least some inherently cinematic aspects to that novel, and the director's defects did not appear quite so plainly. In Portrait it becomes clear that Strick cannot even handle straightforward dramatic scenes energetically and forcefully...
...film is shot with a clumsiness that often falls over the line into incompetence, and the general lack of conviction acts like a shot of Novocain administered to every frame. "Seal off the banana fields!" someone cries in the midst of the final chase, but, aside from that choice addition to the world's treasury of silly movie lines. Firepower is entirely lacking in entertainment value...