Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whether Ballerina Ludmila Vlasova of the Bolshoi Ballet really wanted to go home or to defect with her husband, Dancer Alexander Godunov, may never be known in full. When Godunov, one of the most brilliant of Soviet ballet stars, made his rush to freedom, he did not-or could not-take her with him. Upholding U.S. law prohibiting forced repatriation, the State Department insisted on interviewing Vlasova to see if she wanted to join her husband. Belatedly, the State Department moved to keep her in the country by preventing her Aeroflot jetliner from taking off until, in the words...
Though Brook has brought more new ideas to the stage than any other contemporary director, his film-making skills remain primitive; even his adaptations of his own brilliant theater productions (King Lear, Marat/Sade) have been flat. Here he is hobbled by lapses in continuity, fake-looking studio sets and a multinational cast. The scenery, much of it shot in Afghanistan, is breathtaking, but the photography is routine. What is needed is some sort of theatricality-if not the forthright vulgarity of DeMille, then at least the romanticism of David Lean. With its incongruous mix of radical content and stodgy style...
...firing." Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, charged that Young had been made "a sacrificial lamb for circumstances beyond his control." Instead of being out of a job, said Hooks, Young "should have received a presidential medal" for pulling off "a brilliant diplomatic coup...
There are moments when Didion overdoes her performance of journalism-as-nervous-breakdown. "I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' " she wrote about the title piece of her brilliant 1968 collection. "The pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece." Her new collection of magazine articles, The White Album, contains a disagreeably calculated column she wrote for LIFE...
Another word for it is nihilistic. It was brilliant to assign Norman Mailer to cover the 1964 political conventions; it was sick to have 1968 covered by the French Playwright Jean Genet, Novelist William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg. That same nihilistic strain infected the magazine's outworn Dubious Achievement Awards, apparently meant for readers of Mad magazine who had aged but not grown...