Word: squid
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Friday: Dogzilla, Ant Farm, The Radicts (NYC) and Squid...
...After some dry runs, the novelist has taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21) features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses. Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are present, from aqua horror ("the creature moved toward the unnatural thing") to Moby Dick denouement (" 'Here!' he shouted, and he drove the saw deep into the yawning beak...
...movie business. He wants to direct films, of course, and he has an idea for a script about a good-looking, sympathetic loan shark. The author's lovely, slightly malicious joke (Leonard has worked in Hollywood) is that among the movie town's barracudas, electric eels and ink-ejecting squid, a loan shark fits right in. Chili clearly has a great future, despite a disagreement with his prospective film's star, a handsome fellow of towering ego but -- got it! -- small stature. Finally meeting Shorty is one of the summer's real pleasures...
...language, but it's still less universal than hands and eyes. So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language, we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which, in every language, means that your problems are just beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical that...
...voiced by Samuel E. Wright) is a Caribbean Jiminy Cricket, fussing avuncularly over Ariel but bound to break into calypso croon. Louis the French chef (Rene Auberjonois) brings sadistic elan to his dicing, flaying and serving of les poissons. Ursula (Pat Carroll) the sea witch is a fat, shimmying squid with malefic revenge in mind -- the sort of Disney horror queen who has given kids nightmares for a half-century. All these characters are given witty, hummable pop songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (the Little Shop of Horrors team), a reminder that the Hollywood cartoon has become...