Word: bits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...entire production was a bit too cheery for the source material, stories that critique society, relationships, wealth and pretentiousness. Not Much Fun is too kindhearted to fully recreate the sparkling wit and bitter undertones which make Parker's stories so memorable. Instead of allowing the lines in each scene to build up toward a devastatingly ironic conclusion, the show went for more regular laughs. In most scenes, this broader comic approach didn't seem to ring true with the sharp and often sarcastic dialogue...
...cast was proficient but encountered the same dilemma as the production as a whole. Trying to keep the audience chuckling throughout, cast members delivered their lines with surplus energy and enthusiasm. As a result, the humor was a bit forced at times, and the sense of suffering which emerges in Parker's stories was lost. Although the actors made their characters pleasant and witty company for the evening, they all ended up seeming two-dimensional. Some of the cast members had their best and most believable moments when their characters were drunk, a condition that invites broader and more slapstick...
...that starts to make the industry's economics go awry, including its 30% operating margins. I have no idea where the breaking point is but there surely is one. To me, $300 billion is a lot of money, no matter who's paying. If Big Tobacco can afford a bit more, fine. But if this is about money--which it seems to be--it's a mistake to suddenly confuse tobacco execs for bottomless atms. It took four decades to get them this close to owning up to any culpability. It's a bigger coming out than Ellen DeGeneres...
...Morphine (Houghton Mifflin, 1983), seemed to argue for the essential blamelessness of most mind-altering drugs and to make little distinction between plants like cocoa and plants like coca--at least in terms of their potential for abuse. Since his recent fame, Weil appears to have become a bit less public with beliefs like this; in promo spots for Weil's pbs specials, the word morphine on the book's dust jacket is conveniently obscured. In private, however, Weil continues to sound defiant. "My views about illicit drugs haven't changed," he says. "There are no good or bad drugs...
...Nuland sees it, the surgeon's role is to assist the body in mounting a concerted defense against the intruders, be they cancerous cells or traumatic injuries. Nuland generally writes with a clarity that any journalist can envy. Still, the eyelids of the scientifically challenged may droop a bit amid the book's vital but unlyrical nuts-and-bolts background passages. For example, one sentence on cell division begins, "Meiosis is somewhat more complicated because its purpose is to result in a spermatogonium or oogonium with half the original chromosome number..." Yes, "complicated" is indeed the mot juste...