Word: dumbness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...eighth-graders had been virtually abandoned by their regular teacher, a white Peace Corps dropout who thought he would find urban education "more meaningful." When he failed to reach the students, he had become bitter and turned against them. "Some of those teachers could make kids feel dumb without saying anything," another Stalvey son, "Spike," explained to his mother. "And they kind of got across the idea to the rest of us that black kids were bad except for a few. After a while, teachers acted like those slow kids weren't even there...
Behind the tragi-comic white mask, Marceau winks at a spellbound audience, at himself, at the whole of humanity. He is a magical and magnetic artist, in the face of whose genius we can merely laugh, cry and be struck dumb...
...Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964). Don Knotts is a wishy-washy bookkeeper who becomes a fish. This sounds dumb, but it isn't half bad. The animated scenes of Knotts as the fish are better than Disney, and the plot (the Navy tries to use him to bomb enemy subs but he has cold fins about it) is pretty daring for a kid's film. Ch. 56, 12 noon. Color, 2 hours...
...There were professors at Bates who asked me if my disinclination toward the church was because I didn't like the church or whether it was a delayed form of adolescent rebellion. That's kind of a dumb question to ask on one level, but it happened to be true in my case...
...Darryl Ponicsan's novel can be accused of enormous originality. But there is an un pretentious realism in Towne's script, and Director Ash by handles his camera with a simplicity reminiscent of the way American directors treated lower-depths material in the '30s. Quaid plays dumb with canny appeal. Young, as a black for whom a noncom's career is a big step up, makes you feel his sense of risk when he stops going by the book on this detail. Nicholson's bluster only partly masks his insecurity as he moves through...