Word: benignantly
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...comic tone, however, is as deadpan as that of a New Yorker profile. The interested-disinterested camera follows its subject for a few days, records snippets of conversation, refuses to strain for socko punch lines or an apocalyptic climax. As an ironic True Confessions, the film may satisfy the benign curiosity millions of people seem to have about Woody Allen. The star of cover stories in virtually every major magazine has now written and directed his own. It is the story of his life and his films, a defense of a public artist's need for privacy, an explanation...
...known, bleach bottles pose no threat to health. But to an alarming degree, petrochemicals that are far less benign but just as durable have for years been discarded as casually as household garbage. Many bear mystifying names: trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, dichloroethylene, dibromochloromethane, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These, and many more, are suspected of contributing to the rising incidence of cancer in the U.S. But experts in the field are quick to admit the difficulty of proving the harm caused by chemical wastes. Says Mount Sinai's Selikoff: "When it comes to chemicals and illness, it's hard to prove cause...
...viewers will be given their first clues to a solution of the mystery: Who shot J.R.? Never in the history of cliffhanging narrative have so many people waited and speculated on the resolution of a plot twist. At last count, 300 million souls in 57 countries shared this benign obsession. When the Ewing family saga begins its new season, the number is sure to be swollen by millions more who will have succumbed to the summerlong blitz of news features, promotions and gossip. Competing networks are advised to broadcast test patterns...
...certain Happy Days sentimentality has encouraged the idea that America in the '50s was touchingly innocent, but at the time the nation seemed infinitely more complicated than that, hugely varied, exuberant and, at this distance, rather strange. The benign nimbus of Eisenhower presided over all of it, and if people snickered at him behind his back, they seemed like adolescents wisecracking about the Old Man, Oedipal maybe, but not completely malicious...
...conventions-having the hero actually pull the trigger at the moment when normally he might be expected to holster his gun, or even fall into hysterics just when he was supposed to be most tightly controlled. Fuller is still doing this in Big Red, but in a much more benign way. In the movie, which traces the lives of four privates and their sergeant (Lee Marvin) from their landing in North Africa in 1942 to the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, one keeps expecting at least one of them to be killed. But they defy expectation...