Word: awkwardly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...From the page to the screen, she found "the inflection of the way one character bears on another alters," and she changed odd lines which were either not idiomatic enough or which modulated the relation of weak to strong characters. As radical as she and Schlesinger were about discarding awkward footage (deleting entirely one twelve minute sequence), the shooting nevertheless required careful planning; because reshooting was a sizeable expense, mistakes were corrected from the footage which already existed. Making a film, Gilliatt remarks, "works out to be like a piece of geometry...
...hand flutter like birds. I don't want to give you the picture if you don't like it. You will either tear it up or bury it in a drawer. You think it makes you look bad, Awkward...
...unavoidable weakness in the occasional dips into ho-hum solemnity. Playwright George Herman's academician alter-ego elbows aside the comic dramatist, forcing a meaning which the humorist could carry less intrusively. Herman's over-seriousness trips us the cast as well. The two straight scenes suffer from awkward blocking and sags in tempo while the comic sections skip around similar problems. What's worse, the dialogue smothers itself under a dead weight of philosophizing. Fortunately, Herman's didactic compulsion interfere only infrequently, and the comedy is allowed to bounce ahead...
...discovery by white youth of black music. It was an awkward, embarrassed rendezvous--a blind date, really. In discussing a blues festival, Guralnick writes, "(There were) many of the same problems which have plagued every blues 'concert' I have attended since I first saw Lightnin' Hopkins at Harvard twelve years ago: a stiff, unnatural atmosphere, an unbridgeable gulf between performer and audience, and a tendency to treat the blues as a kind of museum piece, to be pored over by scholars, to be admired perhaps but to be stifled at the same time by the press of formal attention...
...blame can be placed on the actors. Langmuir's direction is uncertain, and sometimes downright sloppy. His blocking, especially when there are more than a few people on stage, is awkward, and often destroys the fragile spell of Chekhov's language. He realizes that the lack of action in a Chekhov play can become oppressive, so he keeps his actors moving, but they move aimlessly and unnecessarily, and simply make us feel uncomfortable...