Word: overwrought
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...does not manufacture dreams; it preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...
...event to event without much narrative flow. However, the movie is also mercifully spared the hype that commercial film makers usually inflict on biographies of Christ, as in Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake of Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic King of Kings and George Stevens' overwrought 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told. In this new film, there is no digression into the sexual enticements of Salome, no subplot on Barabbas, and no theorizing about the motives of Judas as in Franco Zeffirelli's TV Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, there is almost...
...stage, and cold entrances don't suit him; it takes him awhile to warm up. The only time Badham holds on him for any length of time is after he's just rammed a stake through his daughter's heart, at which point he emits a series of ludicrously overwrought sobs. And the accent? "The vampire vants your blid," he explains at one point. The shame....the shame...
...sharp were the financial reverberations set off by Schlesinger's rather overwrought vision of a coming energy crunch that the Administration felt obliged to send forth Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal in the dollar's defense. Before a Senate committee, he cited Schlesinger's remarks about oil and said that this was "clearly the type of thing that causes people to run for gold." (Aides later maintained that Blumenthal had not been commenting on what Schlesinger had said, but on the Iranian situation itself.) Blumenthal forcefully reiterated that the Administration remains committed to maintaining stable market conditions...
...potential titleholder is Saudi Arabian Sheik Mohammad al-Fassi, 23, who spent $2.4 million to purchase a sprawling, 38-room quasi-Palladian palazzo, originally built in 1917 for a local dairy magnate. Some $1.5 million worth of extensive renovations later, his neighbors are agog at what the sheik hath overwrought on the city's Sunset Boulevard...