Word: downright
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...America has long been and remains a very conservative nation," this liberal realizes early on, and he sets his progressive goals accordingly. Thus, he insists that he merely tried to preserve the rules set down by the founding fathers. Hardly radical, he was downright reactionary, he says, turning all the way back to the year the constitution was written...
...when her lover felt at ease farting in her presence--slept her way to stardom in Fear of Flying. Some will hail Fanny as a reflection of Jong's maturation as a writer. In a sense, that analysis is correct--if Isadora was raunchy, then Fanny Hackabout-Jones is downright base...
Meantime from the podium he projected another character of his own creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your...
...that lamebrained Martin and Lewis movie with the unforgettable musical number--"The navy gets the gravy/But the army gets the beans/Beans, beans, beans..."? These films, and a hundred like them, showed us that being trained to kill people in a brutally authoritarian institution could be fun, in fact, downright hilarious. Just when it seemed that Vietnam had bombed the service comedy into oblivion, Hollywood has chosen not only to revive the genre but to add an insipidly trendy twist by making the first supposedly feminist service comedy. Imagine a cross between Gomer Pyle, USMC and An Unmarried Woman. The result...
...downright appalling, many critics would say. The thrill shows appeal and cater to the viewers' infantile instincts. Film Professor Richard Sklar of New York University compares these programs to a circus sideshow. "The grotesque aspects of popular culture-burlesque, vaudeville variety and pulp magazines-are finding expression on TV today. Television does not go out on a limb; it trails what is happening in society." Some of the toughest condemnations of the shows come from broadcasters. Morley Safer of 60 Minutes blasts such programming as "the worst brew of bad taste yet concocted by the network witches...