Word: waif
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This is little Newt, the only survivor of the human colony. The role is endearingly played by Carrie Henn, 10, winner of a talent search among American girls living in England, where Aliens was filmed. She looks like a Dickensian waif and turns out to have the soul of one as well, brave and clever but never self-sentimentalizing. She is discovered as a silent little creature, scuttling through air ducts too small for the aliens to penetrate, living an almost rodent-like existence. Her plight would be enough to touch anyone's heart, but in this context, only Ripley...
...hard not to be bowled over by 20-year-old Tyson's exotic beauty, and Michael Caine as chief bad guy has never been sleazier. Simone's evil sadistic ponce turns out to be a standard slick pimp, and the tragic Cathy is just another spacey blonde waif with a drug problem--and with a hard-to-believe twist, as we discover at the end of the movie...
...RainCity" (which is not going to please the Chamber of Commerce in Seattle, where the film was shot). A cashiered cop named Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) broods and moralizes as he advances on Wanda (Genevieve Bujold), who runs a shabby cafe and represents experience, and on Georgia (Lori Singer), a waif who represents innocence. Her common-law husband Coop (Keith Carradine) is a hick tough with delusions of gaining grandeur in the urban underworld, but he ends up wearing punk costumes and too much mascara. The picture in turn is plastered over with a heavy layer of intellectual pancake...
What does threaten to turn our gaze from the central action between host and hostess is the shining performance of Jane Loranger. Loranger plays Honey not merely as a drab, "slim-hipped" hanger onto Nick, but as a mostly-clueless waif with occasional but unspoken real glimmers of insight. She delivers lines like "Oh yes, [Nick] has a very firm body" deadpan, and "I don't want any children, I don't want any hurt" with a hysterical intensity that brings on the shivers...
Winter's Tale charts the adventures of Peter Lake, a mythic figure who progresses from waif to demigod, from the late 19th century to the third millennium, preserved by mysterious forces, pursued by the forces of evil, accompanied by his flying steed Athansor. The locale of his escapade is a New York City that neither was nor will be, decorated with baroque snowstorms, peopled by feral children and avaricious millionaires, blighted by the spirits of the poor and, ultimately, illuminated by a distant vision of the Just City. There a bridge will be built, reaching from Manhattan...