Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lighted corridors, picking off victims one by one. But there was only one creature, six frightened earthlings and little more subtext (or, for that matter, dialogue) to the film than there was to Friday the 13th or Halloween. Alien lived as a demonstration of the power of style and sheer moviemaking technique to transform tosh into terror that continues to haunt the memory...
Sigourney Weaver gives a terrific performance as the film's lead. No Rambo-esque musclebound bozo here, mowing down aliens for the sheer brute pleasure of it. Weaver breathes life into the age-old comic book conflict between wicked scientists and valiant humanist. Ripley, her character, manages to realistically combine the gutsy woman stereotype with a caring gentle femininity. A strong and maternal heroine is an innovation...
...Twain and Faulkner. This time out, a case might be made for episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Pearson's parody of high-flown, old- fashioned Southern yarn spinning sounds a little too much like the minister presiding at the funeral of Jeeter, "who had a way with words if sheer bulk and volume counted for anything...
...great reformer Odo of Cluny went to Rome on a diplomatic mission, and there soon began the line of Cluniac Popes who rebuilt the entire church. They reached their apogee of power when Gregory VII marched northward in 1077 to depose the disobedient German King Henry IV by sheer willpower. His march was halted only when the humbled King knelt for three days in the snow at Canossa to plead for the Pope's forgiveness...
...succeeded, Reagan has driven his enemies to ingenuities of denunciation. His sheer serenity, the frictionless certitude of his beliefs, has made him seem a sort of anti-President who has made a virtue of his poolside manner and his ignorance of the world...