Word: overfamiliarity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shot in the Dark and The Pink Panther, Gallic gumshoe Jacques Clouseau was played by Peter Sellers with his overfamiliar banana-peel approach to comedy. In Inspector Clouseau, Arkin follows meticulously in his predecessor's flatfootsteps, but the result is only a parody of a parody...
Saint Joan. Bernard Shaw has aged greatly since his death. His plays are beginning to settle like old houses. More and more cracks show in the dramatic structure. The carpeting of ideas is faded, overfamiliar and, in spots, threadbare. Even the wit is surprisingly creaky: "Oh! You are an Englishman, are you?" "Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman." The ghost of Shaw haunts all the rooms, but his voice sounds more garrulous than eloquent, and he speaks with pedantry rather than passion...
...Self as an Unmade Bed. The good half of Telemachus Clay is its brilliantly evocative staging, the indifferent half its overfamiliar theme-the quest for identity, based on a personal history that sounds the way an unmade bed looks. Playwright Lewis John Carlino (Cages) uses the name Telemachus to invoke the son of Odysseus who could not draw his father's great bow. Carlino's Telemachus is illegitimate, and he searches for the lost father and the fullness of manhood in his Spoon Riverish home town and later in Hollywood...
...play seems a little lonely, a little too distant from its materials, a little too given to mood. Music does service for speech; the Inge touches, the Inge faces, even where effective, seem overfamiliar. Perhaps the play's too plangent and elegiac title helps express what is unsatisfying about its text...
...overfamiliar Soviet plot, in which boy meets tractor girl and lives happily ever after raising norms, was getting too much for even barnyard critics to take. Last week Moscow's Literary Gazette, newspaper of the writers' union, published a letter reflecting the collective complaints of 19,000 "milkmaids, swineherds, calf-maids, gardeners, field hands, tractor drivers and collective farm chairmen.'' Gist: Soviet writers should stop filling their novels with foolishly detailed descriptions of farm chores they know nothing about and calling the result literature...