Word: dopeyness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Company of Women has the same strengths and weaknesses as Final Payments. Both novels succeed on the durability and intelligence of central characters who command respect. Both novels have a tendency to slip into lugubriousness and slick schematism. Felicitas' college days contain too much stock footage from the dopey '60s, and though Cyprian's followers illustrate the spiritual dependency of women in a male-dominated church, they remain only illustrations - sketches of romanticized stoicism...
...citizens who longed for an end to the spoils system now look at some deadheaded, immovable GS-12 and shriek, "But we didn't mean to end up with you!" Of course not. But they did mean someone as different as possible from some political boss's dopey nephew, and up showed the GS-12. It will take more reforming to produce the perfect civil servant or the perfect Congress or the perfect lobby system. But if the urgings are strong enough, Washington will change again...
...George has had enough this time, and he's left for good--a free man, armed with his latest invention, an envelope with gum on both sides of the flap. At the pub, Harry the horseplayer and the dopey seaman Able (from the new navy) play on George's wild dreams until they convince him that he, with Harry, can revolutionize the envelope industry. Soon George derails again, wanders into the past in a monologue, and we return to the Riley home, a place where, as George explains, "I give nothing, I gain nothing, it is nothing...
...this woman. "She was a kindergarten teacher, then she got into drugs and moved to San Francisco. She went to est, became a Moonie. She works for the William Morris Agency now." In that throwaway speech he has captured the archetypal odyssey of our time. Wistful questings, the dopey cons with which our society too often responds, the inevitable end in materialism?they are all there in that ingeniously compressed comic moment...
American Graffiti. George Lucas' best movie. A recollection of the end of an era--glossed over, perhaps, but that's part of the concept, and the film glistens with a dopey, wistful irony. Lucas combines shimmering, colorful, almost surreal sequences of cars drifting down "The Strip"--heads craned out car windows, bare asses pressed against glass, hoots and come-ons and dares--with plain, naturalistic, informally posed medium shots of his characters; or he sets them against neon. Underneath it all--almost without a break--rocks the music of Bill Haley and the Comets, The Platters, Buddy Holly, and everyone...