Word: sci
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...scientific team assembled by writers Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio, adapting an old Michael Crichton novel, is ragtag and cranky. The chief credential of its psychologist (Dustin Hoffman) is a report on how to handle alien encounters, which he admits cribbing largely from sci-fi tales. The biochemist (Sharon Stone) is a pill popper. The mathematician (Samuel L. Jackson) is a cynic, the astrophysicist (Liev Schreiber) is twittily lusting after a Nobel Prize, and the team leader (Peter Coyote) needs to try a little tenderness. In short, the possibilities for amusing dysfunction are potentially larger than we usually find...
...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 sci...
...sounds like something from the Twilight Zone or The X-Files. Working to unlock the secrets of life and death, the heroes in this tale develop a powerful enzyme with the potential to rejuvenate the human body's aging tissues. But this is no sci-fi fantasy. It is an experiment sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the Geron biotech company of Menlo Park, Calif., and a report on the research appeared in last week's issue of the prestigious journal Science. Not surprisingly, when word of the study first hit Wall Street, Geron's share price jumped...
...renovating a barn into a posh party space, with a bar, a pool table and, of course, a dance floor. He can afford it. October Films paid $6 million for U.S. rights to The Apostle. He also earns a nice paycheck on gigs like this year's Deep Impact (sci-fi with Morgan Freeman) and A Civil Action (courtrooms with John Travolta). That leaves something in the bank for his own projects; he and Thornton are planning a Merle Haggard biopic. "The best of it all," he says, "is I'm a late bloomer. I get better...
...cleverest comedy on TV, and King of the Hill creates a world with far more specificity than any live-action sitcom. Both are smarter, funnier and, in fact, more human than Friends or Seinfeld. Meanwhile, The X-Files draws from a bottomless well of inspiration. Two cartoons and a sci-fi show--why are these better than the programs supposedly about real people and real life? Probably because they are imaginative in ways that would be neither possible nor permissible in TV's standard genres...