Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...encounter with the Klan was probably my most dramatic adventure as a reporter in North Carolina but it was not typical. More common were dull evenings at high school commencements or jaunts to union meetings at rural hamburger stands. At the Forsyth County Courthouse I heard well-meaning politicians worry about library book thefts and ambulance service. At Winston-Salem's City Hall I watched a gruff old Republican alderman roll his eyes while a fellow board member--a 28-year-old former Black Panther--discussed problems of old people in a housing project...
...play Strangers for Bruce Dern, but they'll be surprised at how the stage softens him, neutralizing the eccentricities on which he has built a fascinating film career. Sherman Yellen's drama, about the stormy relationship between Sinclair Lewis and journalist Dorothy Thompson, might have been written as a dull screen biography of a famous American, but Hollywood stopped investing in those bland tear-jerkers decades ago. So it winds up on Broadway, with a film star intent on "flexing his acting muscles" in a role that taps a fraction of his considerable talents...
...aphorisms and observations, in the style of Cyril Connolly's short masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, deserves a permanent place on the night table. Opened at random, it will provide a refreshment, and occasionally a shock, on nearly every page. Brenan can sometimes be wrongheaded, but he is never dull...
There is not much meat to this delicate, whimsical little novel about the friendship of two English brothers, but the bones clack together nicely. Peregrine is a precocious child. His younger brother Benedick is thought to be dull, because for several years he speaks in a private language only Peregrine can understand. Their father, a literary scholar and full-rigged eccentric, is never ruffled by his odd progeny; but their mother, a dithered creature who soon fades out of the scene, is confounded. At the age of six, for example, Benedick inquires, "What's a prostitute?" Peregrine knows...
...script does not offer any. We learn nothing of the Hunnicutt character, for instance, except that she is sophisticated and looks fine in percale. And although the errant husband played by Rogers telephones hearty lies back to America each evening, nothing is established about his betrayed wife. Is she dull, interesting, ugly, beautiful, loyal, faithless, a drudge, a scholar, a rock guitarist? To know these things would be to know much more about her husband, and a line or two would have provided a sketch...