Word: overblown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tremendous proportions," as Ronald Reagan told the U.S. two weeks ago? The TIME Board of Economists met last week to review the state of American business and to try to answer that question. The group's consensus: though President Reagan's rhetoric may have been a bit overblown, the economy is indeed in serious trouble. Declining productivity, recalcitrant inflation and the explosion of Government spending have so shackled U.S. business that growth will be sluggish well into the future. Moreover, the time left to reverse that course is growing short. Warned Otto Eckstein, president of Data Resources...
...script does little more than gesture half-heartedly in both directions. Since Jeffrey Bloom served as both director and author, blame is easy to place. For instance, a bag lady watches over the beach. She is an overblown caricature (with so much paraphenalia that she needs a huge shopping cart, and looking about as crazy as the washer-woman Carol Burnett did at the end of her shows), but with no real purpose. She makes mysterious soothsayings, but remains aloof during times of crisis. But is she a parody of a God-figure, or simply an underdeveloped character...
...story unfolds in characteristic Chayefsky style, with characters hectoring each other in language no normal person would ever use, saying things like, "By dinnertime, I had dispensed with God altogether." Chayefsky's overblown prose is not always a problem; his last film, Network, had flashes of brilliant insight and style. In it, he wrapped his metaphysical bantering around a plot and made his characters real people, not, as in States, participants in a dramatic reading of his half-baked theories about life. When he sprinkles occasional bits of dialogue among the pontifications about "stimuli deprivation" and "the inner self...
...trolling for compliments. Fortunately, that is not the case here. Greene's guarded, skeptical attitude toward his material (in this case, his own life) is consistent with the one he has shown in his novels, short stories, plays, criticism and travel books. The smug, the self-satisfied, the overblown, even the merely happy are setting themselves up for ridicule and a long fall. Minimal expectations are a hedge against disappointment. In fact, Greene's past has been dashing and colorful beyond the daydreams of most; without the ironic filter of his personality, Ways of Escape might read like...
Regan never backed away from his basic principles or essential message abroad, the source of most trouble in the world is the Communist drive for global domination; at home, the fount of most American woes is the overblown, endlessly intrusive Federal Government. In foreign affairs, the U.S. must build up its military power and face down the Soviets. At home, Regan watchword will be less: less federal spending, less taxation, less regulation, less federal activism in directing the economy and curing social ills-in fact, less Government period...