Word: inert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...homosexual hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) search inconclusively for the meaning of their lives. What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. There's more drama, and comedy, in the reviews of critics who committed themselves to Van Sant's anti-Establishment genius after Cowboy and | are trying to justify their enthusiasm now. Talk about desperation...
...certain mystery? Hardly, and this only underscores the dangers of treating Pop art as though it were a homogeneous movement. Mel Ramos' waxen cutie leaning on a tire looks boring today, and the footnotes to Duchamp spun out by French Pop artists and members of the Fluxus group seem inert when they are not merely silly...
Nadezhda Mandelstam, the brilliant, bitter memoirist of the Stalin era, wrote in the early '70s: "Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses . . . have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens." Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were...
...female rappers are creating buoyant messages that transcend the inert boasting so common in male rap. Salt-N-Pepa may have found the most satisfying and successful musical formula yet. Salt (Cheryl James), Pepa (Sandy Denton) and Spinderella (Dee Dee Roper), who met while working in a Sears department store in 1985, punctuate soul-tinged R.-and-B. melodies with teasing, street-savvy raps about maturity, independence from men and sexual responsibility. In 1988 Salt-N-Pepa, one of the first rap groups to cross over into pop radio, released a single, Push It, that sold more than 1 million...
...vehicle, and the obstacle, to Indian autonomy is the immense, inert Bureau of Indian Affairs. The 167-year-old agency, which is in charge of everything from tribal courts and schools to social services and law enforcement on the reservations, has a sorry record of waste, corruption and choking red tape. A recent survey of government executives ranked it the least respected of 90 federal agencies, with the Indian Health Service close behind. An effort to restructure the bureau was halted by Congress until a task force of Native Americans could be assembled for consultation. But hope for progress runs...