Word: flatness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oddly enough, there is less sexual electricity in the air than at a Rotary Club party. All the trappings of the normal sexual dance -talk, gestures and clothing-are stripped away as unessential, and emotions are under tight control. As a result, the proceedings are amiable, but flat. Like the tough-looking woman at the bar, many patrons seem bored. A pleasant young woman with a distressing overbite is standing at the bar, staring aimlessly into middle distance. "I don't know why I'm here," she says. "I'm only nude because there's nothing...
...jolts, and Wilder's sleeping wife is thrown to the seat opposite her and a male passenger takes her place. Wilder, who does not realize what has occurred, begins cooing to, kissing and petting this stranger. For a while, this is very funny, but it quickly falls flat and hardly deserves the five minutes it gets...
...scale sculpture in the round. From Constantinople to Italy, there are plenty of low-relief carvings after the 4th century. But not for a thousand years would there be bronze heroes on horseback to match the Marcus Aurelius on the Roman capitol. From Constantine onward, the Christian emperors preferred flat hieratical art, especially mosaics, whose multiplicity of shapes suited a power based on ceremony. The "otherworldliness" of those gold-and purple-sheathed Byzantine nobles, glittering in mosaic on the walls of Ravenna and points east, is propaganda; there could have been no better medium than mosaic for impressing on subjects...
...results are excruciatingly flat. Wilder has little talent for imitating Brooks' mad comic style, no matter how diligently he tries. Though his films have not yet descended to the puerile level of Marty Feldman's recent Brooks knockoff, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, they contain no big laughs. In place of honest humor, Wilder provides the illusion of knockabout comedy-frantically busy scenes and lots of noise. Only Saturday-morning TV addicts could possibly endure the antics of The World's Greatest Lover, in which characters are forever shouting their lines, bulging their eyes and stumbling...
...Government estimates that net farm income this year will be $20 billion, down a painful 33% from the alltime high in 1973. The average farm family will earn only $5,300 this year, excluding off-the-farm income. As Washington Rancher Lee McGuire says, "Some farmers are absolutely flat-ass broke." Among the flattest are young farmers who bought their land and machinery in the early 1970s when prices were high and saddled themselves with heavy mortgages...