Word: maudlinity
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...FIRST SIDE of Then and Now is apparently "Now." It includes a pretty version of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You," a fairly conventional love song that Doc and Merle's performance and a restrained string arrangement by Chuck Cochran turn from maudlin into lively. The Watsons are equally successful with Tom Paxton's "Bottle of Wine." Merle's instrumental arrangement "Bonaparte's Retreat" shows off not only the precision of his and his father's guitar playing, but also the unusually expressive fiddling of Vassar Clements. Clements demonstrates that a fiddle can make you feel things besides...
...will not do for White to have Lion just freak out; he must grow blank and rigid right on the stone paws of a lion that decorates a Detroit fountain. Director Schatzberg (The Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child) bats out these sorry epiphanies and maudlin metaphors with the eager aplomb of a rookie swatting fungoes...
...Piano Player was a really zany movie. But this is about as zany overall as Mississippi Mermaid. I laughed, in spots, as raucously as you can laugh in a nearly empty screening room. And I was swept, protesting, into a story I considered not only tired, but even maudlin in spots. The problem is that I, weaned as an appreciative viewer of foreign films on Truffaut, have come to expect perhaps too much of him. There is the inevitable disappointment that comes with a full house misplayed into three of a kind...
ADMITTEDLY IT'S NOT much plot for five dollars, and Segal doesn't make up for that weakness in any other department. He's dispensed with things like descriptive prose, character development or even the maudlin emotion-grabbing of Love Story. Apparently amusement is the goal of this little book, and any strenuous exercise of intellect or emotions beyond that of, say, The Secret Storm or The Edge of Night is too tiring to be amusing...
...times the clock seemed to have stopped in 1961 or '62, the year Paar quit NBC's Tonight Show. Paar found some old home movies of John Kennedy, to which he added his own maudlin commentary, speaking in an almost eerie way of "the President"-as if J.F.K. still resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In the exhibitionistic '70s, Paar's notion of sly comedy often seemed notably dated too. When Goldie Hawn came on, for instance, he joked about her flat chest. Two nights later he introduced Lee Meredith, a big-bosomed beauty from Neil Simon...