Word: clichs
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...Only a gentleman's C for TIME'S attempt to regurgitate in two pages all the current clichés about the Chinese mind. I was especially amused to read that "China failed for so long to develop natural sciences" because of a "mystical rather than analytical preoccupation with numbers": I had just demonstrated to my seminar on traditional Chinese science at M.I.T. how an interpolation technique developed in the 1st century B.C. had been applied to the solution of equations like 2x³ -85x² -85x -87 = 0. Our next topic is the calculation...
...intended as a paean to racial justice, but Producer-Director Otto Preminger chooses strange ways to display his big brotherhood. One sequence shows Negro sharecroppers singing a white-eyed hallelujah number reminiscent of those '40s films that pretended to liberalize but patently patronized. Two hours of such cinematic clichés make the viewer intolerant of everyone in the film, regardless of race, creed or color...
...third off-Broadway drama, Missouri-born Playwright Wilson has not avoided the cliché that small towns spawn only people who are quirky and vicious. Fortunately, the honesty of language, the evocative direction of Michael Kahn, and the uniform skill of the cast, make Wilson's vision plausible. In his play, the milieu is really the message. Something in the U.S. heartland's culture itself seems to stifle his characters' heartbeats whenever they try to make an openhanded gesture of the flesh, the mind or the spirit. Wilson's Rimers are indeed what their collective name...
...time is approaching when the instrumentalists of Powell's Music fall silent, and what is called for is a long, critical view of Powell on his podium. That "character is fate" is a cliché; the fate of Powell's characters is, like a capricious bomb, historical chance. There is really no sense in any of his creatures except their determination to make their folly explicit in their own words and actions. They live to die. Yet for many years to come, they will also live in the compelling echo of Powell's funereal dance...
Hamlet, as the theatrical cliché has it, is the play in which the title actor cannot fail. It might be truer to say that he can never wholly succeed. The part demands the range of a concert virtuoso, for Hamlet is both gentle and brutal, passionate and detached, slow to act yet violent in action-a volatile tangle of will, thought, word and deed. Hamlet is also the first supremely self-conscious hero to tread the stage. This is where Richard Pasco's failure is most manifest. He portrays a computer's Hamlet, mechanically feeding himself punch...