Word: overblown
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...such relative calm? For one thing, Oceana's rough reputation has always been a bit overblown. The bars are gone now, and the town's businesses consist mainly of a coal company store, a bank, two coin laundries, an AMC-Jeep dealership, Wanda's Beauty Shop, Roberts Motel and a Montgomery Ward catalogue office. "We have no bars, no parking meters and no coloreds," says Frank Laxton Jr., a used-car dealer and Oceana's mayor...
Does he have any advice for aspiring directors? "Don't do it, it's a rotten life, a dumb job." Moore says the position has been highly overblown, probably because of cinema, where the director has much more control. "Plays used to be staged by the stage-managers," he said, "but films have carried over the idea that the director is a charismatic force, an 'auteur.' I've never made an 'auteur' film...
...other overblown attempts at humor such as an accidentally flooded living room ("It's my new swimming pool!" Wilder explains, floundering among the floating chairs), shrill and tasteless jibes at homosexuality, and scenes in which the mere sight of fat people is intended to be funny. Wilder can make such devices laughable for a while, but they are worth a chuckle at most, and not the guffaws he tries (and fails) to extract from them. Repeated as often as they are, they become downright boring...
...largest afternoon daily, is now the flagging ship of the Hearst chain, so far behind the Los Angeles Times (circ. 1,018,000) that to call the pair rivals is an overstatement. The Herald-Examiner has lost more than 400,000 readers in the past decade with its overblown headlines and underreported stories. The staff is so demoralized that even the scabs hired to break a strike ten years ago eventually went on strike. Said a Her-Ex staffer of his peers: "They're all running about two quarts...
...Powell's answer only further confused matters for anyone who has tried to decipher the White House's smoke signals on the economy. Last week Powell again tried. Powell said he had meant that the reaction by reporters to the President's statements about Burns was "overblown" and that it would be an "overreaction" to read into them any conclusion that the two have no differences. Moreover, declared Powell, when Carter said that he and Burns have "never had any disagreements" he meant only that they broadly agree on what the President had called the "inherent conflict...