Word: condescending
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Halley, Jr. is superb as Jim, the runaway slave trying to raft his way into a free state. Jim's character is the only one that is developed beyond the two-dimensionality of the others. Resisting the temptation to condescend to his role or to the audience, Halley portrays a multi-faceted, complex character who is childlike and wise at once, evoking pathos without fishing for it. Were Huck as carefully developed and convincingly acted as Jim, the different episodes of the play would assume the coherence and interest that the production occasionally lacks...
...Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West had pointed out to Constable, was change. Shadows, vapors, clouds, the dewiness of grass in the morning, the dryness of leaves in the evening: nothing is fixed in a schema. Constable became convinced that he must overcome the stasis that convention...
...have to be, and some of it is not. An indication of this may now be seen at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan through June 27. The Whitney has long been conscientious about video art, showing it in regular programs through the 1970s when other museums would hardly condescend to touch it. Now the Whitney becomes the first American museum to give a retrospective show to a video artist. He is Nam June Paik, a Korean who lives in New York City...
...play ing Jews and Nazis) as his father, the movie plods along earnestly, endlessly - schmaltz in three-quarter time. Yet in its elephantine way, The Jazz Singer may attract much of the Rocky crowd, and for the same reasons. It recalls simpler days and sweeter movies; it does not condescend to its audience; it is neither angry nor esoteric. For many, this kind of movie has a certain restorative appeal. Others may find the experience like eating your mother's chicken soup when you're not sick. -By Richard Corliss
...fist-faced women watches TV with the sound off, another goes to work for the circus in Sarasota, a third injures her knee in a fall from her father's horse. Capote's intuition slices through the lies, doubts and fears of these people but he refuses to condescend. He is perplexed by the townspeople who noisily support Quinn against all suspicion. And he is wounded by the quiet pain of Pepper's lover Addie, who nobly accepts her fate when a handcarved coffin arrives in the mail...