Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whether the hazard be death or ennui, where will these "civilian volunteers" come from? There is only one sizable U.S. training school for electronic battlefield technicians, and that is the military. During the Viet Nam War, the Pentagon trained not only its own intelligence units but also CIA and National Security Agency technicians in the arts of electronic-combat surveillance, and some of them may be available. Reportedly the American technicians will also have to be well versed in the use of "sidearms," which, in the Sinai, usually mean Uzi submachine guns...
...sort of anxious resignation set in. A scene that looked relatively simple laid out on the director's storyboard, one that called only for Bruce to negotiate a left turn, might take two days to shoot. To combat ennui, Spielberg and Dreyfuss would sing comedy songs by Stan Freberg, a hero of their teen-age years. Spielberg also had a primitive projection room constructed on one of the boats. "Universal had only two films they could send us from their Boston office," Spielberg recalls. "We watched Ma and Pa Kettle On the Farm...
...speeches droned endlessly on, the white-haired scientist turned in despair to a fellow dinner guest and sighed: "I have just got a new theory of eternity." Albert Einstein's ennui at a function of the National Academy of Sciences was hardly unusual. Though the prestigious organization likes to consider itself the supreme court of American science, it has all too often resembled other self-perpetuating honor societies, like baseball's Hall of Fame or Hollywood's Oscar judges...
...interested, for that matter. Perhaps Tanner and his experiment with modernist formalism has succeeded too well. In approximating life in all its bleak, discontinuous reality, he has made a film that, like most of life itself, is boring. From the perch of his director's seat he surveys the ennui-stricken masses who pour into the movie theaters, hungering for an insight into the chaos that engulfs them. His response; let them cat symbols...
...some critics said. After creating the wily priest and the slandering lawyer in Tiny Alice, the play that immediately followed Virginia Woolf, Albee no longer seemed able to invent any characters that possessed dramatic vigor. They all appeared to be suffering from acute spinal inertia and total mental ennui. Finally, he largely abandoned his strong suit, which was a flair for vituperatively explosive dialogue and bitchy humor. Instead, his characters have spoken for years now with intolerably stilted pomposity, as if they had wandered out of an unpublished work by some minor Victorian novelist...