Word: slick
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...past five weeks, Mexico's Bay of Campeche has presented a harrowing sight to an oil-thirsty world. A relentless flow of uncontrolled crude has been boiling to the surface, then bursting into an inferno. It is casting off a polluting slick that has broken into many splotches and is spreading. John Robinson, the Government oceanographer who heads the U.S. team studying the spill, says that it now reaches over an area 300 miles long and 25 miles wide. Some U.S. marine biologists fear that the spill, pushed by currents, could soon begin to hurt plant and fish life...
...stopped being a straight man and became a live -or maybe frazzled-wire. Murray is a master of comic insincerity. He speaks in italics and tries to raise the put-on into an art form. His routine resembles Steve Martin's, with a crucial difference. Where Martin is slick and cold, Murray is disheveled and vulnerable. One feels that Murray's manic behavior is a cover for some rather touching neuroses...
Martin Kilson, professor of Government, opens the Casablanca every day. The atmosphere is slick, but the food is taste and reasonable, and the drinks are all right...
Alien may prove to be Hollywood's most efficient moneymaking machine of the summer. Technically slick and commercially singleminded, this film attempts to crossbreed the scare tactics of Jaws with the sci-fi hardware of Star Wars. The result is a cinematic bastard, and a pretty mean bastard at that. Alien contains a couple of genuine jolts, a barrage of convincing special effects and enough gore to gross out children of all ages. What is missing is wit, imagination and the vaguest hint of human feeling. Luckily for Alien's creators, such ingredients are not really essential...
Hell as well as Heaven. Absent is a brooding Satan or a slick Beelzebub to direct the traffic of the damned. Elkin's Hell is an anarchic ghetto, "the ultimate inner city" in perpetual and agonizing meltdown. "Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe," he writes. "Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew...