Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Winter term at a Catholic boarding school for boys, and the students are restless. But this is no case of ordinary snowbound ennui, as eager young Gym Teacher Paul Reis (Beau Bridges) soon discovers. There have been "six student-caused accidents" in the winter term alone. Fingers have been mashed, brows bloodied, eyes gouged, as if the boys were all under the rule of some demoniac impulse...
...There are now clear signs of voter weariness with the campaign, and a distinct lack of personal enthusiasm for either candidate. The ennui results from the lack of suspense; 84% think that Nixon will win. Another factor is the candidates' inability to excite the electorate. Two out of three committed voters in the poll said that they are voting for the man who is the "best available choice," rather than for the man whom they would "most like to see as President." The implication is that Nixon would not do nearly so well against a stronger candidate...
...weary too of the depredations of youth culture and the S.D.S., the noise of rock carmagnole and the further anarchisms of the "do it" ethic of Rubin and Hoffman. In the adolescence of 19th century Romanticism, the French Poet Theophile Gautier proclaimed: Plutot la barbarie que I'ennui. Now the American mood would reverse the formula: better boredom than that new barbarism. Says Sociology Professor Robert K. Merton of Columbia University: "What McGovern faces is a cumulative counterreaction to much of the mass protests of the last few years, and he is being penalized for them. He is representing...
Puns and innuendos, satire and sometimes crude humor are used in seven of the skits, but is is only in the four in which Allen plays that the humor gets off the ground and is not bogged down by ennui and poor taste. The skit on "What is Sodomy?" in which a doctor falls in love with a sheep is long, boring, and senseless and "Are Transvestites Homosexuals?" assumes that transvestites are inherently funny. They are not. "Are There Sex Perverts?" is particularly offensive. Allen stages a game show "What's My Perversion?" which features a segment in which...
...series of films. The movies varied from An American in Paris through Humoresque to the Gershwin bio Rhapsody in Blue, in which he played himself. In a sense, that was his perpetual role: the man whose pan was not dead but dying -of pain distinctly complicated by ennui. It was a role that he later expanded in three autobiographies and a series of TV talk shows with his long-suffering second wife, June...