Word: high-flown
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...problem in Branagh's approach of demythologizing the plays and diminishing their epic heroes to shopkeeper scale -- as he also determinedly does in the film Henry V -- is that he tends to conceal or cut out the glories that make Shakespeare unique. Lear, for example, drops much of the high-flown language and reduces the former King's mad scenes in the storm and at Dover from symphonies to single brief movements. As played by Richard Briers, this is no autumnal monarch but a mediocre middle manager peevishly protesting his pink slip...
...question is whether Bok's call for public service verges beyond rhetoric--is this just another report along the lines of last year's one on ethics, which was followed by little practical result? In light of such high-flown rhetoric which was left hung out to dry, we are left skeptical about the degree to which a philosophical endorsement of public service can actually constitute a pedagogical...
...plot, such as it is, turns on the attempts of the Madonna character to interpose her own project, an adaptation of a high-flown allegorical novel about the risks of living in an overly technologized world. The opaque and overwrought passages that she quotes sound unfilmable. Yet even if the text is drivel -- and it resonates that way from the stage -- its search for meaning touches some inarticulate longing in the secretary who is given it to read and, eventually, in her boss, who for a while joins her quixotic crusade. He starts out trying to seduce...
...least foot the bill. As they labor to come up with a program to fulfill the goals Reagan announced last month, White House aides realize that in the era of Gramm-Rudman they must fight drugs on the cheap. One top Administration official privately tempered the President's high-flown rhetoric with bottom-line bureaucratese. Said he: "You've got a zero-sum game as far as budgeting goes...
...moments call for considerable patience. When the author's first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, appeared last year, reviewers guessed at such august influences as Twain and Faulkner. This time out, a case might be made for episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Pearson's parody of high-flown, old- fashioned Southern yarn spinning sounds a little too much like the minister presiding at the funeral of Jeeter, "who had a way with words if sheer bulk and volume counted for anything...