Word: lair
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Batman Returns, everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman, of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively calls him "Anti Claus." The Penguin's sewer-level lair, Arctic World, is a garishly colorful place; it has ice-white walls, chartreuse toxic bile and a giant yellow ducky that serves as the Penguin's Stygian barge...
...perhaps you'll find yourself in an herbalist's lair, a shop like the one run by Ron Teeguarden in Venice, Calif., crammed full of respectable-looking people seeking Astragalus, said by the Chinese to strengthen the immune system, or the prized Reishi mushroom, purported to help counter the effects of chemotherapy. Teeguarden, 44, who spent years in Asia studying herbalism, offers private counseling for $35 a session to clients who include John McEnroe and Lisa Bonet. And while you're in the neighborhood of California, you may even wander over to one of several Ayurvedic centers, where therapists ! will...
Midway between the lair of the Bengal tigers and the stamping ground of the African elephants at the San Francisco Zoo is an attraction more commonly seen along city sidewalks: a parking meter. But drop a quarter in and you get a lot more than 30 minutes of parking time. When a donor turns the handle of the modified meter, a mechanical red-throated hummingbird flies across a jungle scene, signaling that the donation will be used to save a small plot of tropical rain forest...
...from seeing it depicted in the current hit thriller The Silence of the Lambs. In the film, agent trainee Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, matches wits and quips with toothsome terror Hannibal ("the Cannibal") Lecter and chases down molting madman Buffalo Bill, right into his creepy lair. In real life, behavioral-science agents remain largely deskbound at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., hunkered down in a windowless converted bomb shelter 18 m (60 ft.) below ground. But the film is right on target in one major respect: few people are as adept at entering the mind games...
Most films offer the viewer one thing at a time to look at, one emotion to feel. A dyna-movie demands more; the eye must search every corner of the film frame for glancing gags. Look closely in the villain's lair in RoboCop 2 and find effigies of his patron saints: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Elvis, Oliver North. Listen hard to Gremlins 2 and catch witty details about zillionaire Daniel Clamp's cable empire. It includes 24-hour channels devoted to archery and laundry, and a movie channel featuring "Casablanca, but with color -- and a happier ending." Gremlins 2 should...