Word: backdrop
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...moon to land there any time in the foreseeable future. Later, noting gravely that Gemini would pass 16 times over North Viet Nam, 40 times over Red China, eleven times over Cuba, the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Red Star fumed that the spacemen were "spying." Against this backdrop, President Johnson last week gave the go-ahead for a major military effort in space, announced plans for the Air Force's $1.5 billion Manned Orbiting Laboratory (see following story...
...apotheosis of trumped-up celebrity, an authentic contemporary creature whose every misstep makes thousands leer. Because her passions are only skin-deep, her tragedy is trivial. But at every toss of her blonde mane, every shard of a smile, all else on the screen becomes mere backdrop. Her stunning presence-and Schlesinger's stylish tracking of a playgirl's progress -makes Darling irresistible...
Dingaka may mark a trend of sorts. Most made-in-Africa melodramas use throbbing tom-toms and tribal dances merely as an exotic backdrop for the doings of great white hunters, drunken missionaries, or dissatisfied colonial wives. In Dingaka, South African Writer-Director Jamie Uys does not stint on music and dance, which are an absorbing show in themselves. But the details of native life always remain relevant to this earnest, primitive drama about a proud tribesman (Ken Gampu) whose thirst for vengeance hurls him against the apparatus of white justice in Johannesburg...
...such a closely-knit sequence of highly charged events compressed into a narrow time span. If those events all work together to virtually place the viewer inside the main character's skin, the film attains tragic proportions; if they do not, it degenerates into sensationalism. In The Pawnbroker the backdrop of the city creates a matrix which binds up the different devices and makes them effective. The pawnbroker's cage or the ugly apartment houses standing for the community achieve a near-symbolism, so that the viewer stops thinking in terms of reality and enters the special world of Nazemann...
...archy's prose is in lower case (the cockroach typed out his copy by jumping onto the keys, but was not heavy enough to depress the shift lock). Unbroken by capital letters and sparsely punctuated, it reads like a kind of slow, dead-pan monotone and provides the perfect backdrop for the good phrase, the turned cliche, the well-dropped contradiction...