Word: clunker
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Despite any rumors, Cincinnati Reds Manager Sparky Anderson has not returned to the used-car business. It's tough to tell though, considering the clunker he has been driving lately. It certainly bears no resemblance to the Big Red Machine that cruised by the Yankees in four straight games last October for the team's second straight World Series victory. Five weeks into the season the Reds were blowing leads, big and small, failing to produce in the clutch, surrendering runs in bunches, falling down in the base paths and sputtering along under .500. "This has been...
...Kael has unmistakably earned her pedestal. With a gritty, grappling brand of opinionation (and largely because of it), her review slot at the New Yorker has often produced sparkling minor masterpieces. She's become the Chopin of the pan. When she lights into "Lost Horizon," the multi-million dollar clunker in Reeling, it's a virtuoso performance. "To lambast a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge," she writes. "He is to movies what Liberace is to music, and once, on a television talk show, I saw them both. . .and the two unctuous smiles came together. Mr. Bland...
...Barry Lyndon, critic after critic has written, is an extraordinarily beautiful film. Unwilling to admit they saw Barry Lyndon as a failure (because they know Kubrick is smarter than they are and may have one more trick up his sleeve), they tell us how "beautiful", how "visually stunning" this clunker is. Up to a point, they are right. Barry Lyndon is an unusually beautiful film. But $11 million still buys an awful lot of beauty in almost any art form and Barry Lyndon hardly breaks any records in the cinema beauty contest. Take, for example, the many indoor scenes Kubrick...
Slothful. There is also more in the endless procession of campaign histories, represented this season by a capable but rather specialized volume, Nazi Victory: Crete 1941. And of course, one genuine clunker, priced at $6.95, from Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Called Hitler's Last Days, it is the brief but mesmerizingly dull memoir of a minor staff officer named Gerhard Boldt, who, as it turns out, constructs Hitler's very last days from already published sources-since he was not there...
That is why the extraordinarily accurate a capella performance of his Mass (1963) by the Glee Club and Choral Society was a pleasurable emotional experience as well as an impressive display of musicianship. Except for one clunker that occured when the singers failed to listen to each other on the Credo "passus et supultus est" and an octave became a major seventh, the Glee Clubs exhibited a professional command of the difficult intervals and harmonies. Unfortunately, the great energy that was consumed in singing the right notes left nothing for interpretation, and the resulting dynamic inflexibility diminished much...