Word: inept
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...industrial plants in the Bytom region in Upper Silesia struck to protest government failure to honor many of the agreements it made with Solidarity last autumn. In the Lower Silesian city of Jelenia Gora, 250,000 workers staged a general strike on Friday to dramatize then- disaffection with inept local Communist officials...
...smile of beneficence--but he deploys them willingly. He provides a continual comic center to the film with his sly corruption and his charmingly sleazy hokum, often delivered at omnipotent volumes over what one suspects is the only amplifier in the Brazilian backlands. Diegues subtly uses Wilker's ridiculously inept shamming to represent more seriously the modern demand to sell out and adapt. One of the blackest jokes in the movie occurs when Lord Gypsy annoints his draught-plagued audience with bogus snow to the crooning of "White Christmas;" Gypsy proclaims "I can make it snow in Brazil like...
...being hard of hearing, mistook "pilot" for "pirate" and apprenticed him to brigands instead.) There is the pretty girl he falls in love with, and her father, "the very model of a modern major general." And there are the cowardly police, led by Tony Azito, and the pirates, so inept and soft-hearted that they will spare anybody who claims to be an orphan. After a time every ship they capture is unaccountably manned only by orphans...
Ways of Escape takes Greene from his mid-20s to the present, while making him seem just as inept and hapless as ever. This is not easy, given his spectacular career. So he dwells whenever possible on failure. He finds in two of his early novels "a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke." He studies himself as a beginning writer and concludes: "I am not sure that I detect much promise in his work." He characterizes his low-echelon work with the British Secret Service during World War II as "futile." Occasionally, he has to confront...
William E. Colby, 59, former CIA director, repenting the agency's use of organized-crime figures in an early '60s Castro assassination plot: "You couldn't find a more inept crowd than the Mafia...