Word: oomph
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Although it means to present Jesus as a revolutionary, the production lacks both political and metaphysical oomph. The framing device is the dream of a homeless man sprawled next to a sign reading NO HOPE. At the end, as other homeless people accept help from would-be good Samaritans, he glares until they leave. He is beyond salvation. Then he leaps up and runs off, pursuing an apparition of Jesus into the heart of backstage darkness. This leaves the theologically precise to wonder whether they are supposed to have just witnessed the Second Coming. But no. It's just...
...stage and the evening as a whole. In a solo performance of "The Ladies Who Lunch," he convincingly plays the part of a rowdy drunkard. Simultaneously bitter and giddy, Schaffer uses his alcohol bottle and shot glass to emphasize his emotional waverings. A raspy timbre gives his voice extra oomph, and Schaffer deliberately exaggerates his performance in the classic "ham" style to please the crowd...
...real cut at the ball. If you would put more power behind your swing, you would improve your batting average 100%." Bush added that he took the advice, and brought his average up over .250. This story has been retold as a goof on Bush: no bat then, no oomph now. But it ) cuts two ways, for Bush put in the work and did improve himself...
...nightclubs and TV variety shows, is now big business. Its practitioners work comedy clubs, the concert circuit and cable TV, where their material is available to children. One way to get attention, to appear hip, to make a provocative point or just to give a joke some taboo oomph, is to talk dirty. Plenty of comics don't; the most popular TV comedian of the '80s is clean (and funny) Jay Leno. But plenty do. Just watch them on HBO or Showtime. Sam Kinison, a kind of defrocked evangelist of red-neck rage (and also, in spurts, funny), provoked...
Herman's story could be played as brisk black comedy, an "I Led Three Wives" with memories of death ever kibitzing in his restless sleep. But Mazursky is scrupulously fair to the characters -- so fair that Enemies lacks his films' customary oomph. When it is not vitalized by the beautiful performances of Olin and Huston, the picture takes on Herman's dithering lassitude. And yet there is a method to this meandering. Novelist and director both know a man is more than the sum of the calamities that have befallen him. Herman is a victim, not just of the Nazis...