Word: realm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Between 1945 and 1955, the number of cars in America doubled from 26 million to 52 million. That boom, along with the highways that supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield...
...question of the sphere's origin is left unanswered at the end of the film--along with a lot of other loose ends--but it's really no mystery. It probably came from the Forbidden Planet, a realm first explored in the classic 1956 sci-fi adventure movie. Its inhabitants had mastered the technique of invading people's minds, prying their darkest passions out of them and turning them back on their victims. Obviously Hoffman's character isn't the only figure involved with Sphere who has a good memory for the classic tropes of dystopian...
...that's all right. We're in the realm of homage here, not plagiarism. What's not so good is the failure to make something arresting out of the way the dark side and the bright side of our minds interact. Movies like Forbidden Planet, which had neither the technical sophistication nor the skilled actors available to Levinson, worked their metaphors with a sort of leisurely literateness. Here, all meaning is simply lost in the hubbub, drowned out by the modern imperative to deliver a rush of action, however incomprehensible, every few minutes...
...always get full documentation, and to acquire a work of art is, in almost every case, to bring that work of art from the private realm into the public realm," he says...
...easy for me to open up to faculty members in high school because of my mother, but at lower levels, I do not remember feeling comfortable at any time to speak with the teacher or discuss with classmates. This feeling of isolated individualism carried over into the academic realm. Rarely were we encouraged as students to ponder methods of inquiry in depth at an early stage in the learning process. Only on a cursory level was investigation and imagination fostered--there was always rote memorization, an atmosphere of discipline and a strictly structured day to inhibit free thought...