Word: reptilian
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...Franz (Gunter Lamprecht) takes an oath to stay honest. In his terms, that means peddling tie clips, shoelaces, sex books, even Nazi newspapers, but not pimping or joining a gang of thieves led by the brusque dandy Pums (Ivan Desny) and including his friend Meek (Franz Buchrieser) and the reptilian sadist Reinhold (Gottfried John). Franz's reward for innocently going with the gang on a heist one night is to be pushed by Reinhold from the van and have his right arm crushed under the wheel of an approaching car. Reinhold pushes other things on Franz: his cast...
...held to be ideal, and it may be that the largest purpose of the movie, faithfully based on one of S.E. Hinton's popular novels for young people, is to demonstrate to the impressionable that imagined Edens generally turn out to have a rather large and very real reptilian population...
...World War I destroyed an entire generation of Western Europe's best men, the West has tended to call war futile, the kind of thing that brown rats do to each other in a locked room. Seeing its horrors, we conceive of it as history gone mad, the reptilian brain taking over, the savage part of us wading through gore wearing ivory-handled pistols: war as a picnic of cannibals. The Icelandic author Halldor Laxness found the murderous fascination of war in the Old Norse texts of Scaldic poetry, the hymns of the "kill spree." The poets were particular...
...relish arguing about bones as much as digging them up. But after much debate, most now agree that a Brontosaurus head should not be the familiar, friendly snub-nosed skull of children's books and TV's Flintstones, but rather a much more elongated, toothy and reptilian-looking skull. Yale's correction, to be sure, is a little tardy. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago have already changed their Brontosaurus heads. What makes the Peabody's fossil surgery so interesting is that the original foul-up was caused...
...terrorist assassin's goal is always drama and publicity; his chief professional concern is (to put it grotesquely) one of casting. So there was something tragically spectacular in Mehmet Ali Agca's choice of victim. A strike of such reptilian malice against one of the globe's few authentic moral and spiritual leaders was a fiercely pure example of terrorist logic: the act should produce a profound moral dislocation, shattering not only state law but also human sensibility. The terrorist seizes what people value most and crucifies it upside down; he aims to induce a paralysis...