Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...premise is slender. Because of farfetched plot developments, a crew of seven earthlings lets an alien invade its spaceship as it returns home from a routine interstellar mission. The toothy alien is no fun: his ever changing appearance summons up everyone's worst fantasies about shellfish, and his sole aim is to devour each of the crew members. Once this narrative pattern is established, the only suspense involves the question of who will be eaten next. Since the movie's generally good actors (among them Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Sigourney Weaver) all play...
...bloodletting scenes aside, Director Ridley Scott (The Duellists) settles for mere competence or even less. He signposts plot developments; the meanderings of the ship's pet cat too often precede the alien's attacks. Scott's allusions to other hit movies do not reflect well on his own. Alien features an all-knowing computer called Mother that is no match in humor or malevolence for Hal in 2001. Though the spaceship's interior recalls both 2001 and Star Wars, the audience never learns enough about its array of gadgetry or the overall layout of its various...
...plot condenses the turmoil of the 1960s, exploring dislocations between generations, races and cultures. Lev, a Russian dissident, joins his family in the U.S. after 20 years of imprisonment. He finds that his disaffected son Yuri is entangled through a girlfriend in a feud with a Muhammad Ali-like superstar named Olympion. The feud erupts in a ritualistic race riot in which Yuri is nearly killed. Under its impact, all the relationships in the opera are splintered into despair and confusion...
...could easily be the plot to an episode of "Medical Center," but such situations have led to a real-life drama currently playing in the courts and hospitals of Massachusetts. Due to recent technological and medical advances that enable doctors to keep patients on the brink of death alive and to treat with limited success the previously incurable, doctors and lawyers are for the first time tackling the question, "Who, if anyone, should pull the plug?" In the case of an incompetent patient--such as the very young, the unconscious, or the mentally retarded--who should take on the awesome...
...panicky scrambles to get aboard any departing boat. It is a rich and poignant chronicle, and Farrell has researched it down to the last palm-oil statistic. If only he had been content to write history instead of fiction. For the book is not so much imagined as documented. Plot developments, like Singapore rickshas, serve to convey the reader from one exhibit to another. On your right are the rubber industry warehouses, repositories of greed; ahead is Chinatown; up the hill is Tanglin the English colony's surrogate Surrey...