Word: skeletonic
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Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically plot props and . . . please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely yarn -- the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt -- then let it unravel at the denouement...
...created its dinosaurs inside out: a simplified skeleton, then skin covering, then coloration, then the fine tuning with wrinkles, scales, dirt. "You see skin moving over bones and over muscles," says ILM's Dennis Muren, who directed the project. "When the brachiosaurus walks, the weight of its chest makes it swing back and forth." Dippe believes the process is so adroit that, "if we had real dinosaurs, we'd probably still do it this way. Our animals don't get tired or hungry...
...audience cannot make sense of the of the bizarre melting pot of images Williams assembles. He indulges in several impressionics tableaux: the opening pageant, a procession of religios penitents, a neo- Nazi interrogation scene. Are we to take the different scenes as individual sketches, held together by a skeleton plot, or does some dramatic unity lurk in these disparte vignettes...
WITH ABOUT 45 MINUTES OF NEW FOOTage added to the already existing theatrical versions, and with the films themselves rearranged in chronological order, THE GODFATHER TRILOGY: 1901-1980 (Paramount; $199.95) amounts to a kind of cinema archaeology in which the skeleton of some great creature is brought forth from the past to stand on exhibit. This Godfather may not look the same, but when the archaeologist in charge is Francis Coppola, the object is not literal reconstruction but further improvement. If only nature got as many second chances as movie directors. This trilogy has a novelistic density, a rueful, unhurried...
FORGET ABOUT WHETHER AN ERRANT COMET, ANGRY volcano or invidious virus killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists have still not explained how the Saurian dynasty got started or why it dominated the earth for more than 150 million years. The discovery in northwestern Argentina of the fossilized skeleton of a 10-kg (22-lb.) carnivore that is 230 million years old may help paleontologists begin to solve the mystery. In the British journal Nature, researchers from the University of Chicago and the National University of San Juan, Argentina, report that the dog-size predator is the most primitive...