Word: bland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Michael Cimino thought he was John Ford. Everbody told him he was. His movie was a hit, America, the critics said, was ready to grieve over its tarnished honor and indomitable spirit. Despite its relentlessly bland directorial style, its contrived, overdone script, its torturous three-hour length, The Deer Hunter moved audiences with its sheer emotional power. The movie got all its force from an amazing cast that included Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken, Cimino, though, was a talented, but unimaginative, amateur: it was obvious in every frame. Yet the movie "touched a chord." While the socially conscious...
...exceptional lab at a productive time. But she depends too much on the flow of experiments, the blow-by-blow description of discovery to keep her book moving. There are no add personalities that stand out. no irreverant wits. Perhaps Brito's preference for "having quiet technicians and completely bland people around" really is wonderful. ("They don't notice anything wrong...They keep us all sane," Brito claims.) But this lack of funny incident, of weird quirks is what separates the book from other inside tours of biology, such as Horace Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation. Judson made...
...serving in World War II intelligence, rose through the ranks of the British Secret Service to head it between 1973 and 1978, and who was believed to be the inspiration for both "M," the intelligence chief in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and George Smiley, the deceptively bland hero of John le Carré thrillers like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; of cancer; in London. In 1979 Oldfield emerged from a brief retirement to head an antiterrorist security force in Northern Ireland following the assassination of Earl Mountbatten by the Provisional I.R.A...
Indeed, the inside jokes and the conviviality of the production speak for its intimate appeal to its audience. A credo emerges that seems to say, "Our music might be bland and our acting may not be stellar, but we still think we're some of the most important people of our generation." The show's program lists the setting as an obscure Eastern law school, but the fact that it takes place at Harvard has a lot to do with this attitude. The vast majority of the people in this country only know Harvard as the Law School...
What shows up in the Crimson each day--despite an elaborate system of editing and proofreading--is often very raw; the product of panic and deadlines, hurried phone calls and illegible notes. It is sometimes bad, usually pretty bland, but occasionally very good and once in a while it manages to be very very good. There is something for just about everyone in this book, though it is unfortunately short on politics, the subject which has driven Crimson editors to many of their best pieces over the years. It won't really tell you what The Crimson is all about...