Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...conferences. No other explanation will suffice for the appearance of these two new comedy- fantasy thrillers. As it happens, both films have popular, if not honorable, antecedents. The Fly is a free, gory and engaging remake of the 1958 sci-fi horror movie, directed by Kurt Neumann, about a scientist who tampers with nature and switches heads with a housefly. Howard the Duck is a bestial bloviation of Steve Gerber's Marvel comic books of the '70s. The first film expands and enriches its schlock source; the second turns a wiseacre mallard into a $40 million promotion for stuffed Howards...
...quack fu" who reads Rolling Egg and DQ magazines. He grows angry: "No more Mr. Nice Duck." He waxes philosophic: "No duck is an island." When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard battles a scientist (Jeffrey Jones, funny against all odds) whose body is invaded by a giant lobster-scorpion space troll. Moviegoers who are in search of a porno Zoo Parade may enjoy the bedroom tryst in which Howard's human sweetie (Lea Thompson) discovers a condom in his wallet, snuggles up and asks...
...good news: a gross-your-eyes-out horror movie that is also the year's most poignant romance. Its scientist hero, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), is a kind of genius mutant. His mature brain percolates tomorrow's ideas, but his heart is as fragile as that of a child in a plastic bubble. He knows it too. "I don't have a life, so there's nothing for you to interfere with," he genially tells Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a journalist planning a story on his research into teleportation. She gives him a life -- hers -- and their tender affair seems...
...whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly transparent so that...
...lawyer and political scientist with no bankerly credentials, Conable has suddenly become a central figure in the Reagan Administration's ambitious . plans to end the dangerous Third World debt crisis. His job is to buttress the lending efforts of the sedate World Bank, an institution well known for funding Third World dams, roads and other good works but never before considered a strategic centerpiece of the effort to maintain international financial stability. Conable's intention is clearly to change that. In his first official interview last week, he told TIME, "The World Bank is going to be a catalyst...