Word: boast
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is little to boast of here. The original play has been transported to the screen apparently by moving van. The sets might pass muster on a stage but look like pasteboard before the camera lens. Director Mark Robson records the action from a static position corresponding to front row center. The actors pass before the camera, mouthing lines of thimble-witted dialogue ("There stand the loins from which you sprang"; "Everything you do is so tragically irrelevant") that are open pleas for some heavy editing...
...other hand, Nixon! can boast the work of a fine Nixon mimic in the person of Glenn Stover. Although in his cockier moments he does tend to take on the accents of a Hubert Humphrey instead, for the most part Stover's impersonation of Nixon--the nervous hands, the calculated expressions, the condescending attempts at explanation--are right on target. In fact, there is almost a naivete about this caricature that would make Nixon endearing if he weren't already so incredibly appalling. One moment he's attempting to ingratiate himself with Chairman Mao by telling a few Japanese jokes...
...Thomas Stamford Raffles, who paid $5,000 for the right to found an English settlement on Singapore in 1819, cherished a lofty vision of its future. "Let it still be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light," he said. "Let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolate, but as the gale of spring reviving the slumbering seeds of mind ... If the time shall come when her empire shall have passed away, these monuments will endure...
...first is "Rembrandt Creek," which "looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets." The second, "Carthage Sink," is about "a Goddamn bombastic river" that suddenly dried up in mid-boast...
...incident is a reminder that G.I.s have long acted as if the roads of Viet Nam belonged exclusively to them; the wise Vietnamese gets out of the way when he sees them coming. Many Americans, moreover, are prone to boast that they would not stop for an accident if they could possibly get away. As one Army major in Saigon put it: "There is a long-established pattern of force and offense among Army drivers. You assume the road is cleared until it proves otherwise." Route 1 proved otherwise...