Word: mumbo
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...Levin has other ideas. In The Boys from Brazil, he pulls 64-year-old Mengele out of shady retirement to play a grotesque caricature of himself. As he did in Rosemary's Baby, Levin bases his new plot on a perversion of planned parenthood. This time the mumbo jumbo of the occult has been replaced by the gizmos of science fiction...
...budget of this movie would appear to be approximately half the price of a ticket. No matter, because audiences whoop it up at all the synthetic terror and threadbare mumbo jumbo. There are many moments of low comedy, all inadvertent, as when Abby beats up on her husband, croaking "You are gonna love and obey!" as she pummels him. The rampant foolishness, indeed, may be part of the point. Audiences know that Abby's appeal is way low-down and prefer to chide themselves for enjoying it. As much as they may laugh, though, audiences could never put themselves...
...such original comic novels as The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down and Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed displayed powers of camouflage, mimicry and verbal play that drew praise from his peers-though very little cash from his publishers. As a black writer with a ticklish touch, Reed had to sit in the back of the literary omnibus until the white audience tired of having their heads whipped by the Cleavers and Joneses...
Andreski is convinced that "much of what passes as scientific study of human behaviour boils down to sorcery," and suggests that the lay reader learn to differentiate between the mumbo jumbo and the occasional work that is valuable. How? By testing his brainpower on a few hard books like Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and J.H. Woodger's Biological Principles. If these volumes are comprehensible but the work of a particular social scientist seems obscure, "then you can justifiably suspect that it might all be nonsense...
...scatological rereadings of history, Reed comes up with an idea called Neo-HooDooism, a pastiche of an imaginary, ancient African aesthetic and a rip-off from the HooDoo coven of black poets to which Reed belongs. What plot there is to Mumbo Jumbo deals with a search for the ancient, original HooDoo text...