Word: sci-fi
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Predock's own favorite residential work is the Fuller House, a more dramatic faux village finished two years ago in the high Sonoran Desert near Phoenix. It is more determinedly "spiritual," portentous, even sci-fi. "I like haunted, charged spaces," Predock explains. Inside is a polished black granite fountain from which water runs in a narrow, razor-straight canal outdoors, across a plaza and into a circular pool. There is a pavilion for watching sunrises at the east end, another for staring at sunsets in the west. The study is a stepped pyramid of volcanic stone, topped with a skylight...
...past decade movie-theater queues have resembled waiting lines at a sock hop. Teenagers stormed the box office, and Hollywood cloned films in their image. Their favorite genres -- sci-fi fantasies, peekaboo sex farces, gross-out horror movies -- multiplied on the screen, and sequel followed sequel followed sequel. Who needed adults? Those forgotten creatures stayed home with their TV movies and VCRs. For them the local multiplex was a teenagers' tree house bearing the sign GROWNUPS STAY...
...often, as Critic Mikal Gilmore points out, graphic novels still tend to be "overblown bad comics, using fancy paper to do bad stories." But a work like Watchmen -- by common assent the best of breed -- is a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi, political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats into a dysutopian mystery story. It is as engagingly knotty and self-referential as The Name of the Rose, but instead of monks doubting their faith, here are superheroes weighed down by their creed, caught in a world they never made...
Hints of yet another space odyssey appear at the finale and should be ignored. 2061 occasionally offers a challenging sci-fi aphorism -- "Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation" -- but by now the mix of imagination and anachronism is wearing as thin as the oxygen layer on Mars...
INNERSPACE Sci-fi satires may finally be B.O. poison, but Director Joe Dante knows how to send the genre out (and up) in a blaze of tangled plots, visual bravura and comic-book savvy...