Word: tinkertoy
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...becomes, at its best, a nightmare incarnate. It can also sometimes go quite wobbly, with ripely absurd dialogue and the most primitive sort of human characterizations. The movie is about ants, and it is clear that everyone involved was a lot more taken with them than with the Tinkertoy people provided by the script...
...take the shape of a helix, or spiral. From the X-ray crystallography laboratory at King's College in London, where Biochemist Maurice Wilkins was also investigating the molecule's structure, they quietly obtained unpublished X-ray data on DNA. Relying as much on luck as logic, they constructed Tinkertoy-like molecular models out of wire and other metal parts. To everyone's astonishment, they suddenly produced a DNA model that not only satisfied the crystallographic evidence but also conformed to the chemical rules for fitting its many atoms together...
...Think Tank. The program might have been laid out according to the McLuhan notion that in TV, form counts more than content. In M:I the Tinkertoy stuff on the screen is far more important than plot logic. In one elaborate ruse, the M:I team stole a whole train and pulled one car full of passengers into a shed where, with the help of films and sound effects, they convinced the passengers that there had been a wreck. In another, they saved the day by starting an earthquake with supersonic waves. This week, they unnerved a murder-for-hire...
...looked like a huge, ominous Tinkertoy: an abstract tangle of pipes, scaffolds and ladders against a moody blue backdrop. The singers, clambering over it with starkly stylized gestures, seemed to be groping through a hallucinatory dream sequence. "It was," said the composer, "an ideal staging that caught the nightmarish quality I intended and gave it an extra dimension...
Producers are now furiously trying to groom new Coburn types, but his seamy-faced, hard-guy specifications are so disproportionate that it is a bit like trying to build a giraffe out of a Tinkertoy. He is 38, though his croppy thatch of sandy hair makes him look like a delinquent graduate student. A lean 6 ft. 2 in., he is a rangy tangle of angular limbs; in action, karate-chopping his way through a thicket of villains, he suggests Ichabod Crane doing the jerk...