Word: whaled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What if Herman Melville had been a screenwriter in the age of Jaws? Would it have occurred to him to give Ahab's sense of injury and obsession with revenge to the whale, to put the moral and psychological shoe on the other flipper? And if he had had the temerity to shop so weird a concept around town, would some producer have had the common sense to tell him, "Back to the custom house, Herman...
Probably not, for the analogy be tween killer whale and great white shark is just too tempting - they are both big, strong and mysterious, therefore scary to landlubbers. Television documenta ries have taught us that the whale has a complex language and, since he may also be monogamous, perhaps a human like emotional life. It is easy, therefore, to anthropomorphize the whale and then cobble up the kind of plot line that runs sluggishly through Orca...
Bluhdorn is hoping to repeat the success of The Godfather with one of the dozen or so movies that Paramount will introduce this year: Orca, the saga of a killer whale, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, or Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a Richard Brooks adaptation of the best-selling novel. Columbia is putting its big bets on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another science adventure epic, and The Deep, a successor to Jaws, which is the highest-grossing motion picture of all time (MCA's count of the worldwide gross: $196 million). A rash of copycat productions...
...musician stood up and jangled a heavy iron chain. A trombone player occupied the spotlight and made wheezing sounds that resembled a sick whale mired in primeval mud. Children in bright blue robes played hand bells. Someone rang sleigh bells. Scattered in the balconies, five trumpeters held foil pie plates up like mutes and blew. The string section looked like errant students assigned to the back of the room to repeat the same musical sentence at least 25 times. That was just about the case (see below). High on a ramp, the strings were lined up facing Assistant Conductor David...
Lost in the shuffle of homers, runs, and strong pitching was the fine defensive game turned in by catcher Rich Trembowicz. Trembowicz "had a whale of a ballgame" according to Park, and his diving catch of a foul pop near the Harvard bat rack in the top of the eighth was the big play in the field for the Crimson yesterday...