Word: paled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...power play by the CIA to maintain the United States' dominant position in Latifundia, a fictional South American country, sounds like the inevitable background for one more pale carbon copy of The Ugly American. Classified communiques pop up like toast at the breakfast table, a recording device is hidden in a tie clip, new leaders are found by a spin-the-bottle technique, and the real rapport between nations rests on a Jellolike foundation of friendship between Latifundia's President and the American ambassador. Despite the apparently insurmountable handicap of so familiar a scenario, Robert Wool has managed...
...justify a permanent exclusion of the army and navy from Harvard, one must characterize them as inherently and irrevocably evil, as somehow beyond the pale of civilized society. That analysis is a little glib. Harvard was able to support the United States armed forces eagerly during World War II, and the same might well be true of a future military commitment--in the Middle East or Berlin, for example. There is nothing wrong with the proposition that the role of the military in foreign policy decisions should be curbed, but to pretend that the army is something the country...
...casting failure persists all down the line. In the film the part of Nikos, the young scholar who takes Zorba with him to Crete to operate an abandoned lignite mine, was played by Alan Bates with a pale, perplexed intellectuality that was a perfect foil to Quinn's animal magnetism. In this musical's stunted version of the part, John Cunningham acts like a graduate-school grind...
Most of the performers just hang around, hoping that Lawrence, Lee, or Herman might throw a bone their way. The usually redoubtable Milo O'Shea can't do a thing with the pale Sewerman, for example. And when O'Shea can't breathe life into a script, that's a sure sign the script is dead...
...Cordelia is appropriately sweet and good; Patricia Elliott as Regan and Marilyn Lightstone as Goneril are properly serpentine. Only Stacy Keach disappoints, by failing into smirky stage-villain mannerisms as Gloucester's bastard son Edmund. His performance misses the point of Shakespeare's transcendent vision which makes earthly villainy pale before the terrors meted out to men by fate...