Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. This adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel turns most of the author's poetry to humdrum visual prose, but Alan Arkin as the gentle, selfless mute John Singer lifts the film out of the ordinary...
...example, is a novel about three characters. Warren, Arthur and Junie, who set up platonic housekeeping together, squabble amiably, seek work, vacation at the seashore and, in various ways, find love. Presumably, such a book would have to be filled with novelistic bravado to lift it above the humdrum. But since Warren is a paraplegic, Arthur a near-spastic and Junie a hideously deformed victim of an acid attack, the atmosphere is already painfully tense. The challenge for the author is to keep everybody's emotions-his own, his protagonists' and the reader's-from getting...
...death row, or in the terror of a seven-year-old Negro child in an adult ward for the mentally ill, or in what Norman Mailer said or did not say to the college students in Austin." Unabashedly liberal and outspoken, the weekly was often exasperating, sometimes wrong, never humdrum or stale...
Horse-show habits are so humdrum these days-all jodhpurs and jackets and little black caps. But the equestrian quadrille calls for costumes as well as class, and Britain's Princess Anne, 17, was making the most of it prettily dressed in a grey brocade Georgian coat, lace jabot, tricorn hat and wig. To the strains of Strauss, she and three chums put their mounts through the paces, and when the day's events were over, young Anne had won the Senior Individual and Training Cup, a nice surprise to take home to her horse-loving parents...
...indifference of a metronome. Prokosch uses all the four-letter words that his earlier elegance would have found quite supererogatory. Even more drearily, there is nothing new here about Byron. The hero's comments on love and life as rendered by the author fall into a tone of humdrum recital that makes one wonder if the Byron of Don Juan ever existed. He is better remembered in his own words...