Word: lifelessly
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...several Watergate conspiracies. Others unconvincingly denied any participation by themselves or anyone at the White House. But only the relatively powerless John Dean, tainted but nevertheless courageous in his turncoat testimony, made grave accusations of the President's participation in the coverup. His chilling tale, conveyed in a lifeless baritone, was sharply denied by such far more influential and shrewd Nixon intimates as H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell...
...film fails dismally on four grounds. First, there is no human dimension to the characters depicted in the movie. The real people Young films and the characters Young creates either say the obvious things you're afraid they will say or stand only as lifeless symbols in Young's moving picture puzzle. There's no justification for the use of people in these roles. For all Young uncovers about the dehumanized college graduate, he might as well have put a "College Graduate" sign around a rock and used that for his symbol...
...peripheral bit players first reach the reader, filtered through the ironic mind of Dr. Plarr. His own bereaved mother, living on sweet cakes and self-pity in Buenos Aires. Romantic Novelist Jorge Julio Saavedra, author of The Taciturn Heart, whose machismo-marinated works are timeless and thus lifeless as well. A British ambassador who begins to sense the sheer outrage of U.S. imperialism when he finds that the embassy cook automatically fries his eggs Yankee style. Fortnum's wife Clara, who is (yes) a graduate of Madame Sanchez's immaculate brothel and the object of Fortnum...
Above them towers the stone wall that Herod the Great erected around the Temple Mount of ancient Jerusalem. More than 50 ft. below the top of the southern facade, a group of American girls hacks away with picks at the gray, lifeless earth. When they fill their two-handled rubber baskets, they pass them on to a chain of perspiring, bare-chested male students who carry the rubble to the surface...
...just a pleasantly boring presence, a cipher who shows no feelings beyond a spaniel-like curiosity and momentary flutters of frustration that never approach the level of anxiety, let alone threaten him with breakdown. He and the people he encounters are scarcely less abstract than their settings, juiceless and lifeless. Going to a Tati movie for laughs is about as practical as going to an exhibition of Mondrian paintings with the same goal in mind, though the painter may actually excel the actor in terms of motion and emotion. · Richard Schickel