Word: bland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first, Business sounds much the same as last year's uninspired debut effort, but listen closer and you'll discover several excellent sections embedded within otherwise bland material. The liveliest, most adventuresome song here is the recently released single, "All the Kings Horses." Here Tony Franklin's keyboards actually dominate the song. They sweep up and down and back, then drop to near silence, except for Rodgers' cool and restrained vocals. Similar to the opening to Van Halen's 1984, the keyboards provide a musical foil for an oscillating rhythm section...
Robert Schuller, 59, a bland-looking but calculatedly theatrical performer, presides over the vast, glittery Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. Finished in 1980 at a cost of $18 million (paid largely by viewer donations), the structure serves as a dazzling stage set for Schuller's weekly Hour of Power. The show, seen in 169 cities, beats Swaggart in some audience listings. Schuller's TV budget is $37 million a year, and the 10,000-member cathedral spends an additional $5.7 million on non-TV operations. The author of several inspirational best sellers, Schuller shook 10,000 hands...
...have more influence. The second opinion, though it still thunders through Washington, has failed to convince anyone except the right-wingers who voice it regularly; it has fallen on notably deaf ears at the White House. And so more and more people who once belittled him as hopelessly bland or philosophically out of step are now accepting the third image of Shultz. One by one, his more assertive rivals find themselves relegated to the sidelines while Shultz's views are heard on an increasing number of issues. Few in Washington doubt the description of Shultz's prominence voiced by Donald...
...much greater than his prowess in articulating it publicly. Lately he has permitted himself some public flashes of the temper he shows in private, pounding a table angrily in December when a Yugoslav official offered some excuses for terrorism. But for the most part his public utterances are studiedly bland and numbingly repetitious. In Shultzspeak, the invariable progress report on any problem is that "we're working at it." Even his wife Helena has complained, "George, you sound so dull...
Able to walk the fine line between a bland documentary and an overdone "epic saga," Kusturica tells the story of a Sarajevo family's struggle during the consolidation of the Yugoslavian state under Tito. The story is told in part through the eyes of Malik, the son of an aspiring Communist Party officer. Malik's Father's "business trip" (as a forced laborer) begins when a political cartoon appears in the party newspaper. The cartoon shows Karl Marx writing at a desk, with a picture of Tito on the wall behind him. Father--known as Mesa in the film--mentions...