Word: dullness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...already been decorated with a Nobel Prize, be an indication that Singer, then 74, was thinking of slowing down? In retrospect, ! of course, it would have made more sense and wasted less time to be concerned that birds would stop singing or the world suddenly grow sensible and dull. Forces of nature do not stop voluntarily. Sure enough, a book of 22 new Singer stories appeared in 1985, and now here come 20 more in The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories. In the space of six years, while moving into his ninth decade, the author has managed to render...
...good as her word, but her parsimonious expenditure of language does not imply a poverty of experience. On the contrary, she tells of her early years as a chambermaid at an Adirondacks hotel and her unexpected marriage to one of the guests, a rich but supernally dull stock trader: "I read some time ago that they're building robots that think. If such robots are built they'll be just like Boris." Next comes the surprising turn in which Boris introduces his handsome young nephew into their lives, obviously engineering his wife's adultery. It works, and that is followed...
Writer-Producer Anna Thomas and Writer-Director Gregory Nava have swathed their story in the amber sunsets of nostalgia. But this patina has the same effect on the winceable dialogue and agitated performances as lacquer on attic furniture. The farce of Destiny proves, yet again, that the road to dull is paved with bad pretensions...
...road that winds past valleys with olive trees and shepherds tending goats. Red-tiled roofs of the village houses spill down the mountainside. Everybody waves, smiles. Pelopi is as famous for its hospitality as for what the Greeks call sovaros, or seriousness. In American politics that may translate into dull and dogged, but on Lesbos, sovaros is high tribute indeed, and the people of Pelopi have it by the barrelful. For just that reason, Pelopi's President Constantinos Stephanou says he foresaw a bright future for Dukakis even back in 1976 when the Massachusetts Governor paid the village a visit...
...Give him his due. He's got a feel for the pols, and he can sum them up with a brutal line or two. On Meet the Press a few weeks ago, Anchor Tom Brokaw asked if Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the leading Democratic presidential contender, was just "too dull to be an effective nominee." Nixon was ready, dark flash from the eyes. "Let me answer that question this way. I've often said that the best politics is poetry rather than prose. Jesse Jackson is a poet. Cuomo is a poet. And Dukakis is a word processor...