Word: painful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...filming, Actress Jane Fonda plays a secretary in a Los Angeles firm that is so large and anonymous that she and her water-cooler chums are not even sure what business it is in. However it does at the box office, the movie is sure to draw howls of pain from personnel officers. Reason: all over the country, companies are finding that despite today's near 6% unemployment rate, they are having to cope with a severe shortage of secretaries. That shortage is, in no small measure, caused by the lingering image of secretaries as decorative gofers...
...major problem is that the adult characters are caricatures. Writer Judith Ross clearly wants to create the kind of people one finds in Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky films: well-intentioned, articulate neurotics whose comic behavior exposes their internal pain. Unfortunately, Ross has a tendency to sacrifice believability for broad gags. We are asked to accept, simply for farcical purposes, that Franny's otherwise bright parents (John Lithgow and Kathryn Walker) would pull an elaborate ruse to fool their child into thinking that their dead marriage is a happy one. Ross not only characterizes Jamie's father (Terry...
North Dallas Forty is a painful movie. That is to say, it is a movie mostly about pain-the god-awful physical consequences of playing professional football for a living. It is about the sport's normal bruising, which can render a fit young stud so lame that it is agony for him to roll out of bed the morning after a game. But more important, it is about pain at the abnormal levels, about the anesthetizing pills the guys pop to endure daily practice, and the even more dangerous stuff they receive in shots on game...
...come and, then, robbers and soldiers; the Atlájala is fascinated at the complexities he finds when he looks out through the eyes of men. Finally, a man and woman unhappily in love enter the valley, and the spirit enters him. It finds "a world more suffocating and painful than the Atlájala had thought possible." Within the woman, though, "each element was magnified in intensity, the whole sphere of being was immense, limitless." At the top of his art, Bowles is an anima; to inhabit this book is to experience pain and immensity...
There are moments when Didion overdoes her performance of journalism-as-nervous-breakdown. "I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' " she wrote about the title piece of her brilliant 1968 collection. "The pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece." Her new collection of magazine articles, The White Album, contains a disagreeably calculated column she wrote for LIFE...