Word: humdrums
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...reason the storied fancies of E.T.A. Hoffmann cannot work as ballet too-as long since proved by Coppelia and The Nutcracker. This Hoffmann has a recomposed score by John Lanchbery that draws also on other colorful Offenbach works. But its choreographic steps and gestures are trite, even humdrum at points, and devoid of the kind of grand line that grand ballet at its best demands. (Ah, those outstretched arms signaling the courtesan's entrance-as in a silent film starring Theda Bara...
...incisor was the herald of a literary revolution: the precise, unexpected, vivifying detail added to the general statement, which was to be the mark of serious fiction for the next century. While Flaubert was reveling in the exotic surroundings, he was mulling over a novel about life back in humdrum Normandy, where he knew the people and spoke the language. Accord ing to Du Camp (and Steegmuller tends to believe him) it was on a barren hill overlooking the Second Cataract of the Nile that he cried: "Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary...
Kaufman's efforts began in earnest in 1970, when he opened a new office building in the Wall Street area. From a distance it looks like the other towers all around it-humdrum-but it has its surprises. On the roof stands a replica of a World War I Sopwith Camel, complete with an AstroTurf runway and a wind sock. Says Kaufman: "It's something for the workers in surrounding towers to look...
Dirty Harry--A hack detective thriller directed by the talented Don Siegel from a script laden with authoritarian preaching. Clint Eastwood, perhaps the least talented superstar of all time, is Harry. With The Omega Mess, Charlton Heston in humdrum sci-fi. ASTOR. Harry: 1:15, 4:40. Omega...
...some of Goffman's critics find him trivial and limited. "People just do not go around with their attention constantly focused on how they are being regarded," objects Berkeley Sociologist Herbert Blumer. All the same, Blumer considers Goffman "an innovative scholar" who "can take human interplay which appears humdrum and show it to be intricate, dynamic and dramatic." Indeed, Goffman's work may be not so much social science as social commentary. In the words of one behavioral scientist, "Goffman is the waste of a good novelist...