Word: mewling
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...Sethi's engrossing if uneven debut is written in astoundingly assured prose that belies the author's youth (he is 25), particularly in his throbbing takes of contemporary Lahore, where he grew up and returned to after his undergrad years at Harvard. He describes everything from the "mewl of bargainers" at a fabric shop to card games played by bored guards at gated homes like the one in which middle-class narrator Zaki Shirazi lives. Also in the house are three related women whose lives mirror the tottering arc of recent Pakistani history - from partition to the bruised Bhutto years...
...since the Q. in Critic is for Quibble, here are a few. Berlin, with those six (terrific) songs, and Harold Rome, with three (lesser) ones, might be overrepresented in a show meant to be panoramic. The two sketches are amusing, and give the stars a chance to mewl and mug becomingly; but, from the same book (The Greatest Revue Sketches) that Viertel & Co. dipped into, I'd have chosen George S. Kaufman's brief, devastating "If Men Played Cards As Women Do" from Berlin's Third Music Box Revue of 1923. It has a quartet of burly gents punctuating...
...America and its film industry had not been so profoundly racist, Robeson would have been on his way West. But Hollywood thought that blacks should simply shuffle and mewl; so Robeson's one major U.S. film role was in Dudley Murphy's 1933 independent film production (released by United Artists) of "The Emperor Jones." The spectacle of Robeson lording it over not only black savages but a white trader in the 1933 "Emperor Jones" film was galvanizing. And threatening: he'd have to find film work elsewhere...
...Irene Dunne and Charles Grodin as Ralph Bellamy. If the new cast spells magic to you, rush to S.L.O.T. You'll see Chevy stumble down an entire hillside and get his nose bobbed by a series of vengeful swinging doors. You'll see Goldie giggle and mewl her way through a dozen predictable dilemmas. You will find that you've seen all this before, and better...
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