Word: screens
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Audiences in search of funny girls have learned to forsake the theater for Valerie and Mary on the smaller screen. Mary opts for the soft approach. Every week, as Mary Richards, the effervescent assistant TV producer, she manages to discover fresh comic possibilities in herself and her supporting cast... On Mary's shows, nothing is sacred and few things are profane: sex, inflation, urban miseries and small-time office politics are alive and laughing on prime time... Between them, the two very different, identical comediennes are the season's brightest clowns. On every show they prove that women need...
Those ideas had their genesis in the early 1980s, when Wolfram began to explore a type of computer program called a cellular automaton. It typically consists of a row of black and white pixels on a computer screen--the "cells"--and a simple rule for transforming that row into a new one. A rule might go like this: If a pixel in a given position is flanked by pixels of its opposite color, reverse its color when drawing the corresponding pixel in the next row; if not, keep it the same. By automatically applying the rule on each...
...this galaxy was working from a very rich palette. In its digital version (Clones will be shown on traditional film in most theaters), the image is shallow but sharp and subtle. If this is the future of movies--at least of epics with visual effects that make the 'plex screen a computer screen--bring...
...know that her nephew is in fact a superhero; but it's also on us, because she has pinpointed what we like about not only Spider-Man and his geeky-sweet alter ego Peter, but most of the masked marvels we've followed from the comics to the screen. We don't want our superheroes to be invulnerable Supermen--Clark Kent's sad-sack persona is as essential to fans as Superman's ability to turn steel girders into pasta ribbons. It's not enough that superheroes fight our battles. We need them to suffer our heartbreaks, reflect our anxieties...
...comics' patriotism, Spider-Man's nods to the current war era are more elliptical. The World Trade Center towers were excised from one scene; New Yorkers refusing to be terrorized by the Green Goblin sound a note of Let's-Roll-ism. (The American flag filling the screen in the final moments, on the other hand, is as subtle as a black-widow bite.) It might be off-putting, seeing a superhero saving New York, reminding us that there was no one to catch those airliners in his supertensile webbing last year. But Spider-Man's flawed hero fits naturally...