Word: weir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...says Seymour Papert, 59, the gray-bearded, South African-born M.I.T. mathematician whose theoretical work in the arcane field of artificial intelligence led to Logo. "It convinces the child that he can master the machine. It lets him say, 'I'm the boss.' " Says Dr. Sylvia Weir, a pediatrician who works with the Educational Computing Group at M.I.T: "People have usually considered the stupid thing in the classroom the child. Now the stupid thing, as it were, is the computer. And the child is the teacher." Giving children this kind of control can sometimes have dramatic effects...
Weirton, W. Va., was not exactly named "in honor" of Ernest T. Weir. Rather, when Weir bought a tract of farm land in the state's panhandle in 1909 and built a sprawling steelmaking complex, he needed people and houses to go along with his factory. Thus the town was born. Today Weirton Steel Co. is a division of National Steel Corp., but a majority of the labor force in Weirton (pop. 25,536) still works in the rumbling, fuming steelworks along Main Street. "It's sink or swim together," says Mary Brula, a bank teller whose husband...
...charged-up folk tale complete with Robert DeNiro as an MIG-toting ubermensch. And in Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola made war something mythic; something so big and so surreal that one wondered who was playing The Ride of the Valkyries after all. But in Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli, there is something of a retrenchment, at least intellectually. In the movie, war does not get treated so much as it simply occurs. Instead of a homily or an exegesis, Weir delivers a story...
...STORY of noble, well-meaning men who enjoy a friendship and then must endure war, it is poignant and masterfully drawn. Peter Weir safely navigates the film away from both bombast and ineffectuality. The relationship of Archy and Frank is at once simple and affecting as it unfolds through the short, lyrical scenes. Both Lee and Gibson acquit themselves well in their roles and give sound, straightforward performances. Weir's direction of the background characters is better still. As random soldiers, desert wanderers and Australian ranchers, the supporting actors turn in a number of superb vignettes...
...bathos after the first battle scene and a few half-hearted scenes of soldiers at liberty in the market in Egypt--the sounds that accompany Boyd's overwhelming images are the film's only flaw. Even the zipping and buzzing muzak noises would not be so awful except that Weir repeatedly splices between them Albinoni's dirge-like Adagio in G minor to signify CRITICAL MOMENTS and IMPENDING FATE. The fault lies not in the adagio, which is a fine piece of music, but its repeated use as a cue is silly and melodramatic. Yet, it is by no means...