Word: siren
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Rationality means turning away from the siren lure of mysticism and confronting beautiful theories with ungainly facts. "The so-called New Age," he maintains, "is really a throwback to the early times when we believed in ogres and devils and monsters and evil fairies. We knew so little about the world that it seemed filled with intelligences superior to our own. Naturally, we lived in terror. But now we know so much about the whole universe. Now we can concentrate on real evils...
From the opening credits (a police car's siren light cruises down a street, onto the sidewalk, into a house, through a girls' shower room) to the closing crawl (which confides, "In case of tornado, southwest corner of basement"), The Naked Gun is a picture in thrall to its own silliness. Three of the film's perpetrators, the ZAZ team, spoofed '70s disaster epics in Airplane! and spy movies in Top Secret! Now they have stolen from themselves, extending their 1982 TV series Police Squad! to feature length. The stretch marks show, in a plethora of chase scenes and bathroom...
...alone, and Pattaya, a quiet fishing village just two decades ago, is a bloated red-light area studded with 256 hotels. Indeed, the metaphor of selling out is given flesh by the embarrassing statistics of Thailand's sex trade: perhaps 250,000 women in Bangkok alone respond to the siren call of a business that goes hand-in-hand with tourism. And the get-rich-quick promise that tourists embody has also led to shadier enterprises: Thailand is already famous for its pickpockets, smugglers and heroin dealers...
...screams a press release for Disk Watcher 2.0, a product that supposedly prevents virus attacks. Another program, VirALARM, boasts a telling feature: it instructs an IBM PC's internal speaker to alert users to the presence of a viral intruder with a wail that sounds like a police siren...
...sulky siren that Pfeiffer made her first mark, as a punkette in Grease 2, as Al Pacino's coked-out wife in Scarface, as a Hitchcockian heroine with a Los Angeles '80s twist in Into the Night. Then, switching on the Cinderella smile, she became a princess in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke and the sweetest witch in Eastwick. She has played movie stars in Sweet Liberty and PBS's Natica Jackson, two fables about creatures of illusion manipulating the reality of voyeurs who dare mistake the actress for the role...