Word: overlong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that the Almighty has never appeared in a very good film, although considering the talent involved in this one--direction by the intermittently brilliant Carl Reiner and a script by the dependably slick Larry Gelbart--Oh God! should have been an irreverent romp. What emerges is an overlong television sketch, a limp, unimaginative, and boring monument to middle-class tolerance; in short, a popular favorite that could set comedy back...
...like the ectomorphic Smiley, The Honourable Schoolboy resists shrinkage. Its events are febrile, its local color relentless and sometimes overlong. This often obscures suspense and the Le Carré trademark: a fine irony that smashes beautiful political theories with hard facts. That irony is apparent in the very word Circus (see box), center of British intelligence. Once a roiling three-ring operation, the place now resembles a shabby, peeling carnival depleted of funds and dignity...
...requires that the girl guess Rumpelstiltskin's name or give up her first-born child to him, and sure enough, Hamish's origins are unknown, at least to Elsa and the reader. Gemma ultimately reveals her husband's identity at the end of an amusing but overlong story of her introduction...
...plot is complicated and overgrown, including both sighing lovers and slapstick comedy, the latter provided by rustic laborers rehearsing an opera within this opera. The main weak point is the tendency for overlong recitative passages that stretch audience interest thin at times. The singing dialogues, however, especially the rustics', are splendid. In the end, after all the trials and tribulations of True Romance, there is a grand reconciliation when the status quo is restored. Good-humor and realism prevail over magic. At this point, the rustic laborers' comic rendition of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe is not only...
Judging from the reactions of both those who make TV and those who watch it, Network, which opens in 15 cities on Dec. 17, has drilled into a sensitive national nerve. Overlong and preachy, exaggerated even within the bounds of satire, the movie nonetheless has the power of a frightening revelation (TIME, Nov. 29). Like the Frank Capra films of the '30s and '40s (particularly Meet John Doe), it is half entertainment and half message, a populist plea for the individual against inhuman institutions. But unlike the movies of those optimistic days, there is no happy ending...