Word: ineptness
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...F.M.L.N.'s skills on the battlefield have been overshadowed by the deterioration of El Salvador's army. Perpetually plagued by inept commanders and a "9t05" fighting mentality, the military improved over the summer but faltered once the rebel offensive began. The poor performance has prompted Defense Minister Carlos Eugenic Vides Casanova to shuffle his corps of colonels, but the troops suffer from battle fatigue as much as bad orders. Says a State Department analyst: "The army did not so much go back to their barracks as just run out of steam...
Elizabeth Swados has given Trudeau's lyrics (some of them witty and energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. -By Richard Corliss
...interest of this writer. Just as bleak, hollow cocoons of loneliness make up much of Philip Larkin's poetry, is unglamorous, unremarkable lives which are the raw materials of Trevor's prose. But far from being dull, these are absorbing, seamless evocations of character and life style, of curiously inept human beings muddling through life's complications. Infused with a gentle wit and narrated in an unobtrusively direct style. Trevor's stories are more palatable and accessible than Larkin's poems--not burdened by a heaviness of style or mood, but engaging with their attractive blend of wistful melancholy...
...fortyish, a bit bedraggled, quizzically bemused. He is a professor at a provincial English university, bright in his specialty, perhaps, but farcically inept in worldly matters. He tries to uphold the values of humane liberalism but keeps misplacing them, and occasionally wonders sadly whether they exist any more...
...Carmichael, "a witty, talented, acerbic, sarcastic, but always charming" and highly successful New York playwright. The day of his wedding to a glamorous socialite (Janet Eilber) also marks the beginning of a literary collaboration cum romantic entanglement with an aspiring young writer called Phoebe Craddock. Schoolmarmish, sweet, and socially inept, she has no trouble capturing the hearts of Jason, Mrs. Carmichael, their two children and a journalistic superstar called Leo (played with apparent reluctance by Ron Leibman...