Word: mad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LAST year a TV station in Washington D.C. ran a special report on their news show entitled "Is God Mad At Us?" The series took a look at why there seemed to be so many bad things happening in recent years--droughts, plane crashes, earthquakes. It wasn't a landmark piece of investigative journalism, no exclusive interview with the Big Guy. Instead, it consisted of asking theologians, clergy and disaster victims whether the Second Coming was about to take place. I don't know what the conclusions were...
...flow of vehicles. In Virginia traffic supervisors use remote TV cameras installed along stretches of I-66 and I-395 to spot breakdowns, to which they immediately dispatch tow trucks that dispense free gasoline if a motorist needs it. Chicago's highway authority operates a huge mobile crane, dubbed Mad Max, that can lift up to 60 tons, and has moved obstacles ranging from semitrailers to a 500-lb. runaway...
Nancy Thompson was a modern Nancy Drew. And in Renny Harlin's Nightmare 4, Alice Johnson is Alice in Wonderland, falling through the hole of her consciousness into a war with the Mad Felt-Hatter. All the Nightmare films are compact encyclopedias of classical and pop allusions. They quote Poe and Cocteau, Hamlet and Balinese dream theory; they crib ruthlessly from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws, Poltergeist and themselves. They are cultural carnivores...
Schavernoch's imaginative sets contribute greatly to the production's success. Like something out of George Miller's Mad Max movies, they depict an exhausted world where love can be found only among the ruins and the survivors get by as best they can. Hunding's hut is an underground shelter; Brunnhilde's rock, a barren stretch of moonscape, glowing radioactively. The Rhinemaidens disport themselves among the twisted remnants of what appears to be a power plant (shades of Chereau). It is a gloomy, godforsaken land that well suits the Schopenhauerian concept of pessimism with which Wagner suffused his text...
...death. His mother (Joyce Van Patten) cloys and crushes. His girlfriend runs off with the surgeon who may have botched his operation. His nurse, a sulky sadist named Maryanne (Christine Forrest), cares more for her parakeet than for her patient. And Allan's best friend (John Pankow) is a mad scientist of the cybernetic age, Cuisinarting the genes of capuchin monkeys. One of these -- she's called Ella -- is placed in the care of the comely Melanie (Kate McNeil), who trains simians to function as the hands of the disabled. As Allan's new housekeeper, Ella is a dream...