Word: pileup
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Barry Diller inspecting hubcaps: it's a sight strange enough to cause a pileup of rubberneckers on the Santa Monica Freeway. Last February he resigned from one of Hollywood's most powerful posts -- chairman of 20th Century Fox and mastermind of the Fox network -- because he wanted to run his own company rather than continue as a hired hand in Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Hollywood assumed he would return as the head of another studio or perhaps a network, and he did have some exploratory discussions about buying NBC. But when he announced his new venture in early December...
Interstate 75, a four-lane divided highway that crosses the Hiwassee River 35 miles north of Chattanooga, is notoriously prone to sudden fog. But the warning signs and flashing yellow emergency lights did not help last week when a gigantic chain-reaction pileup developed in the highway's gloom. Vehicles smashed into each other in all four lanes. "We couldn't see, but we knew there was something terrible happening around us," recalled motorist Sylvia Fine, who could hear the crunching sound of steel striking steel...
When rescuers finally fought their way through the fog and the wreckage, they found 83 damaged cars and trucks strung along a half-mile stretch of the Interstate. Thirteen people were killed and 50 hurt in the ill-fated roadway's third -- and worst -- major pileup since 1978. Frightened local motorists and truckers could only wonder: How many next time...
...album's songs are all variations on the theme of East-West collision, which, as rendered by Parks, sounds like a rush-hour pileup on the Golden State Freeway. Not that the music is jarring; far from it. Melodies waft about like tropical breezes, blowing a little irony in all directions. Tokyo Rose begins with a typically peppy but odd Parks arrangement of America -- jukebox Charles Ives -- and ends with a tune about baseball (One Home Run) sung in English and Japanese. In between is a chronicle of misunderstanding. Manzanar is about the internment camps of World War II; White...
...that pileup of "onceagains" finally undoes this sequel. For if writers Ramis and Aykroyd have slightly altered the circumstances of their central figures, they have not bothered to develop their characters any further. Dana, for example, has a baby and a tangle-tongued boss -- marvelously played by Peter MacNicol -- who is madly in love with her. The ghostbusters themselves are suffering, to good comic effect, from celebrity burnout and municipal ire over their failure to clean up the mess that they made the last time they saved the city...