Word: inert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Freshman year I tried jogging, but I too died around the first of November. Last year I remained inert and looked it, so this year I thought I'd try one of the most popular sports at the University--weightlifting on the Nautilus machine...
Wheaton, though short of Ph.D.s in some departments, is strong on dedicated teaching. The college excels in math and science. Among the faculty stars is Physicist Howard H. Claassen, part of the three-man team that synthesized a new chemical compound, xenon tetrafluoride, from an inert element. Other points of pride: study tours abroad (one aimed at combatting hunger) and a collection on the work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers and other Christian writers...
...Palma's ineptitude as a writer doesn't help much. He has no sense for dialogue, and cripples the film's pace with a number of curiously inert scenes featuring stiff, unbelievable talk. Then there is a long wordless sequence, a ludicrous, halting flirtation and pick-up in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, drawn out to run 15 minutes in which DePalma (like Kubrick) deploys a steadicam camera, swimming and veering through the chambered rooms, using a subjective panning shot to cover an arc of space that the character, in fact, could take in at a glance. (The device...
...popular insurrection that erupted in January 1978 left physical damage estimated at $1.3 billion. When Somoza finally abandoned the shattered country, he left behind a staggering $1.5 billion debt and a national treasury of only $3.5 million. Today, with much of the nation's productive capacity still inert, unemployment is running at 30% and inflation...
Into this festering, still pool of corruption drops the inert stone of Khlestakov, the young visitor, sending violent waves through everyone else's life but remaining happily, passively at rest himself. Mark Linn-Baker seems deliberately to make no more and no less of this character than Gogol did--which is to say, nothing, a personality-less cipher whose every action either fulfills the most hollow expectations of societal conduct or moves inertially towards a well-fed rest. Unable to choose, he mechanically makes love to both the mayor's wife and daughter--two primped peacocks immobile on a divan...