Word: downrightness
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Bernard Shaw's proverbial preface to the original says the play (or this section of it) is about Darwinism and the expectations of man in history. Yet the drama itself doesn't compress this: it's downright expansive--not an easy effect when your setting is the Garden of Eden and you want to speak simply but not so simply that everything seems symbolic. Director Rob Hershman works with the expansiveness, and when he gets such fine performances out of Richard Bangs and Adam and Catherine Dean as Eve, what emerges is something that shovels ideas less than it rolls...
...development of Wells's ideas. The man behind the ideas is sometimes obscured, but in many cases his overpowering, prolific writings justify the technique, just as their raw energy and wide scope sometimes dwarfed Wells himself in his own day. At times, however, this is slightly annoying--if not downright disconcerting. Wells, after all, led a colorful life, as a pulp-writer, a man of letters, a radical politician, and a libertine par excellence...
While Nixon has decried distortions in the press, his own arguments have been accented with inaccurate historical allusions and downright misstatements that he has never bothered to correct. Cropping up now as a public worry in the opinion samplings is another of those "petty" episodes that the men in the White House swat as if they were mere flies. Nixon went into a meeting with 16 Governors and told them he knew of no other Watergate developments that would embarrass them. The next day it was revealed that one of the tapes had a more than 18-minute...
THIS KIND of thing gets tiresome as soon as the film begins, but gradually the philosophical gruel becomes downright insidious. If one actually were to try to excavate one idea from Siddhartha, it might be that "everything changes," (they also say that "everything returns" in the same breath--the logic isn't clear) "like the river"--a direct steal from Heraclitus's idea that one never steps into the same river twice. At any rate the logic of the film reveals that one should not fight time, or chase wealth, but live in the present and for the moment. There...
...things only got worse: the New Haven sky grew grayer and grayer, obscuring the surrounding hills. By 3:30 p.m. the weather was uncommonly foul. The brightest objects in sight were Harvard's white jerseys, the fans' foul weather gear and the grass on the field. The situation became downright absurd when the gray metamorphisized, converting into rain, and gave 41,247 disgusted fans the excuse to depart they wanted. The Bowl, which had originally been little more than half full, grew emptier and emptier. By the final gun, the 70,000 blue seats were almost entirely bare...