Word: good
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...promises to be an instant rerun of Our Miss Brooks, or maybe Mr. Peepers. Cosby is supposed to play a high school coach, although in last week's premiere he got nowhere near a school, a gym or a teenager. Instead, he jogged what might have been a good five-minute Cosby monologue into a 30-minute yawn about mistaken identity and false arrest...
...come to their middle-class senses in a denouement that is the biggest cop-out since Sidney Poitier appeared as the world's whitest black man in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Mazursky's direction is impersonal and, at best, functional; his idea of good cinematography is getting everyone in focus and lighting the scene as if it were being shot inside a toaster. A few episodes (a session with a preoccupied psychiatrist, or an attempted seduction after a late-night party) do arouse tremors of mirth. There is some valid spoofing of people...
...Sacred cows of all sorts from Winston Churchill to Eleanor Roosevelt are flogged to the abattoirs. Despite some archness and excesses of language, Convert Muggeridge often succeeds in convincing. As he presents them, the Christian churches and their priests-especially the Anglicans "drivelling away their lives"-do not seem good enough, nor the Pope himself sufficiently papal, to minister to the spiritual needs of our bewildered world. The Muggeridgiad stays amusing withal; cap and bells are this prophet's hair shirt...
True, his timing is not always as good as it is in, say, Reasons of Health, where a character who is as sound and as stupid as a melon is kept in expensive quarantine in Teheran by an Iranian con man posing as a health official. Jacobs is all surface manner, often on the verge of lapsing into mannerism. Sentimental background music swells too resoundingly over some of his wry endings. Rarely touching the deeper implications of his themes, perhaps for fear of losing the rhythm of his routines, he often fails to provide enough serious relief...
...definite commitments, however; the various faculties and the Corporation have the final say on the possibility of a formal affiliation, and this was to delay a decision until the fall. The M.I.T. offer came, moreover, only a few weeks after Harvard's April strike, and there was obviously a good case to be made for the idea that if Harvard was now to become involved in new links with the Defense establishment, it had best move slowly and quietly...