Word: stand-in
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...affair. EU officials have recently groused at seeing their discreet, prolonged efforts to secure the Bulgarians' release snatched up by the new French President. Others have admitted shock at seeing Sarkozy's wife used down as a proxy to both negotiate and act as a photo-op stand-in with the prisoners following their release. French officials deny such cynicism is involved, and say all anyone wants is freedom for the Bulgarians. Still, some effort was made to ensure European officials were associated with Sarkozy's last diplomatic push: the French delegation that flew to Tripoli Sunday included EU External...
...first saw him on the reality show Project Greenlight. Accustomed to hanging out with creative, chaotic grownups, LaBeouf came off as a charmer, a good sport and one of the smarter people on set. The film Holes, which came out the same year, introduced LaBeouf to two of his stand-in father figures, co-star Jon Voight (who's also in Transformers) and Spielberg. Voight lent him acting books and turned him on to the notion that his work could be about more than a paycheck. Spielberg, meanwhile, saw Holes with his kids and filed the curly-haired teen away...
...technology. It was in 1985 that Volkow first began using PET scans to record trademark characteristics in the brains and nerve cells of chronic drug abusers, including blood flow, dopamine levels and glucose metabolism--a measure of how much energy is being used and where (and therefore a stand-in for figuring out which cells are at work). After the subjects had been abstinent a year, Volkow rescanned their brains and found that they had begun to return to their predrug state. Good news, certainly, but only as far as it goes...
Tweaking fairy tales also allows moviemakers to tell stories about themselves without boring us. The Shrek movies are full of inside jokes (the kingdom of Far Far Away is essentially Beverly Hills; the first villain was widely seen as a stand-in for then Disney chief Michael Eisner). Fairy-tale parodies are safe rebellions, spoofing formulas and feel-good endings while still providing the ride into the sunset that pays the bills. In Happily N'Ever After, a wizard runs a "Department of Fairy-tale-land Security," seeing to it that each story--Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.--hews to the book...
...Lord of the Rings” might look to it for inspiration, due to its immense commercial success. But I never expected to run into Gollum again. Or the cave troll. Or any Orcs. However, I was greeted by all (or shameless approximations of) these creatures. Heck, even a stand-in for the mountain troll from “Harry Potter” made an appearance. I’m no historian, but a movie based on the Battle of Thermopylae probably shouldn’t have any monsters. Despite all of these grievances, and the others that I don?...