Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sought their party's nomination but didn't get it--the men who, back in 1978 and 1979, thought they had a chance in 1980, only to have those hopes dashed by repeated primary losses, public disdain or simple bad luck. They are the men who, after campaigning in earnest for months, realized on that Wednesday morning after the latest primary defeat or on that Saturday afternoon after another abysmal showing in a caucus that the support they never had really wasn't there...
...popular vote track the tides moving in a presidential election, but the race is really segmented into 51 parts-the states and the District of Columbia-from which the winner must assemble the 270 electoral votes to put him in the White House. As the campaign began in earnest on Labor Day, TIME asked the Reagan and Carter camps to compile battle maps of how each sized up its prospects; they were published in the Sept. 15 issue. As the finish line nears, these maps show how it looks to each side today...
...script by Lynch, Christopher Devore, and Eric Bergen is earnest and intelligent, though it suffers frequently from the unavoidable heavy-handedness that accompanies the theme of man's inhumanity to man. The scenes with Merrick and various excessively slimy and sinister persecutors flirt with melodrama. Rather than concentrating their fire on these caricatured villains, the writers might have more thoroughly examined the subtler exploitation that Merrick suffers under Treves' care. The doctor worries that the hospital has replaced the carnival as Merrick's freak show, that the Victorian socialites come to have tea with the Elephant Man only to stare...
...midweek, French police announced that they had reconstructed a Suzuki motorbike on which the bomb presumably had been strapped; the owner, Alexander Panaryu, believed to be a Cypriot, was being sought for questioning. And by then, the unity and earnest soul searching that followed the tragedy had given way to confusion and recrimination...
Ordinary People tires very hard to be a great movie, and because it tries so hard it succeeds very badly. I say this feelingly. Redford is earnest, and for this he must be respected; earnestness is a quality to be prized these days. But of course earnestness can't carry a movie--talent must be added somewhere, and vision. There is little of either to be found in Ordinary People. It is not so much a movie about depressed people as a movie that is depressed itself, a movie that sits alone in its room and stares at the ceiling...