Word: overblown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...toward competitive democracies. Many African leaders have long maintained that if multiple political parties were permitted, they would inevitably form along tribal lines, inviting bitter and perhaps bloody confrontations. The Ivory Coast is home to at least 60 different ethnicities; Zaire has 200. While this argument has often been overblown to justify repression, ethnic and tribal rivalries inevitably complicate the growth of democracy...
Having been repeatedly underestimated, the size of the savings and loan bailout -- at the $500 billion so often cited -- may finally be a bit overblown...
LEFTISTS and rightists at Harvard share a tendency to reject all activist militance as empty militance. Conservatives predictably reject nearly all student activism as overblown. Leftists themselves are also to blame, though, for rejecting innovative options. Reluctant to appear too radical, activists here rarely deviate from the norm of University Hall rallies. COCA's recent tactics are undoubtedly militant, and unusual for Harvard, but they are anything but empty...
Unfortunately, playwright Christopher Durang seems convinced that the audience will not understand his message unless it is beaten into them, and his script frequently employs a baseball bat where a fly-swatter would do. The result is a production which, while entertaining, is pretentious and overblown...
...director Amy Cabranes accepts Durang's heavy-handed script much too readily, and rather than toning down the rhetoric, Cabranes has the actors hype the play's already overblown elements. Hernandez's bubble-blowing, Snoopy-wielding analyst comes off well the first time, but a constant repetition of the same sight gags and crazy word substitutions (Hernandez says "porpoise" when she means "patient" at least six times) rapidly becomes unconvincing. Some subtlety would have been nice; we don't need to see Hernandez in a pink nightgown with a teddy to know that her behavior is childish...