Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...London, Conn., of train crews outracing deadly tidal waves and of desperate sailors straining to keep their 1000-ton vessel from from running aground on inland railroad tracks--while perhaps not elegantly presented--are still awesome. To look for some deep meaning in a book like this seems absurd; what it presents is not a search for truth, but a portrayal of the more basic pursuit of survival...
...well as environmental effects influence man's well-known penchant for aggression. Such a suggestion, especially considering the vast weight of evidence that backs it up, does not seem particularly far-fetched, nor does it seem in any degree racist. However, if Professor Wilson's views are indeed as absurd as Ms. Rosenthal seems to think, it would be more prudent on her part to allow his hypotheses to fall victim to the truly scientific method of test by experiment, rather than the politically-motivated haranguing of a nutritionist whose command of the topic is perhaps open to some doubt...
...France transformed itself into the drabness of today. But the Alain Tanner film is almost defiantly hopeful. Jonah examines the shifts in time; the changes it makes in people and their ideologies. If the protagonists end up on a farm outside Geneva as anachronistic misfits with absurd jobs and lifestyles, it's not because they are misfits, but survivors. They are guardians, and if the flame glows a bit dimly at times, well, there's always hope for the child Jonah. The movie would border on the maudlin if it didn't poke fun at itself and bourgeois society constantly...
...such situations of heavy stress, heroes emerge. Trumbo, and other members of the ten, had the same kind of fantasies. When their moment came, however, reality interfered. The ten all grandstanded, and today, looking at the old newsreel footage, they seem not heroic but very human and slightly absurd. A short fund-raising film for the Hollywood Ten, unearthed by Director Helpern, shows the group addressing the camera with starchy informality and faint condescension. But this impression of haughtiness compares favorably with the shrill, uproarious melodramatics of The Red Menace, an anti-Communist crime buster included to illustrate the degree...
...books come to me in mind movies," she explains. "I see the action in Technicolor on a wide screen in my head, and I hear the characters speak every line of dialogue before I write it. All my heroes look like Clint Eastwood -I've had this absurd crush on him for years." Her heroines she imagines as Jacqueline Bisset or Olivia Newton-John. "I just write what comes to me. Sometimes I turn a passage in to Avon without rereading it. I'm just now learning to rewrite competently. But I could never do things to please...