Word: bafflements
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Between the Lines moves between the lives of its characters, shuttling from one comic vignette to the next--but this movement, like those lives, never seems to lead anywhere. Style is substance, but both are so fragmentary that the final effect, when the credits roll on the screen, is bafflement and frustration. Silver's flair is for the short, neatly-shaped segment. From these segments, the bits and pieces of humor and pathos that comprise the film, she is unable to forge any overarching dramatic unity...
...impression that his friend Mike Burton wrote it as a sort of tribute to anyone who's ever done what he wanted instead of what he was expected to do. The narrator is a cowboy who fled the city for a simpler, older way of life, to the bafflement of his friends. One of them writes him a letter...
...slapstick tragedy is not the only reason why people are watching Mary Hartman. The show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum...
...Bafflement is surely the least obvious fault of Bashevis Singer's stories. They all resound with a clarity that comes from sparse language and a discerning eye for only the most important details. And through this clarity, a stark precision that has captured the lives of a very small segment of mankind, there comes a kind of broader perspective I can only call wisdom because it seems so rare in the modern short story...
...could it happen?" a stunned South Vietnamese official wondered last week. "I just don't see how it could happen." His bafflement was shared by much of the world after the swift collapse of Saigon's fighting forces with almost no resistance in the face of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. With rare exceptions, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) did not even stand its ground and fight, dissolving instead into panic and flight in a historic military debacle...