Word: screening
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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While spinning its tale at warp speed, Total Recall creates a coherent world that is part prophecy, part satire. On future Earth the unit of money is, of course, a "credit." Folks flick on the wall-screen TV to check out ESPN's coverage of the Toronto-Tokyo game, then perfect their tennis stroke with the help of a teacher on hologram. Johnnycab, the robot taxi driver, chirps irrelevant pleasantries until passengers want to throttle him. A married couple debate whether to move to Mars -- as if it were the suburbs -- or to Saturn ("Everybody says it's gorgeous"). Perhaps...
...kitchen counter at 36 Irving St. is an Etch-a-Sketch. On the grey face above the two knobs are not the usual convoluted stick men, shaky square house, or the even more usual quasigeometrical mess of random shapes and wiggles. Glaring from the screen is a squat, intricate medieval demon named Baphomet, who has a cross in his crotch, a flaming eye in his right hand and a nasty leer on his toothy face. Baphomet used to be regarded as the guardian of the gates of hell, and here, on the kitchen counter, in the squiggly confines...
...past, the studios will have to top themselves again for the big Christmas season. No problem there. Sylvester Stallone reportedly will be paid $20 million to write and star in Rocky V, a $40 million MGM/UA release due in December. The year-end holidays will also bring to the screen Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather III. The problem-plagued sequel was originally budgeted at $44 million, but it could become the first film to top $100 million...
...quite literally set the pace, but Presidents, preachers, even teachers have not been slow to get the message. Thus ideas become slogans, and issues sound bites. Op-ed turns into photo op. Politics becomes telegenics. And all of us find that we are creatures of the screen. The average American, by age 40, has seen more than a million television commercials; small wonder that the very rhythm and texture of his mind are radically different from his grandfather...
Increasingly, in fact, televisionaries are telling us to read the writing on the screen and accept that ours is a postliterate world. A new generation of children is growing up, they say, with a new, highly visual kind of imagination, and it is our obligation to speak to them in terms they understand. MTV, USA Today, the PC and the VCR -- why, the acronym itself! -- are making the slow motion of words as obsolete as pictographs. The PLAY button's the thing. Writing in the New York Times not long ago, Robert W. Pittman, the developer of MTV, pointed...