Word: plaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ending fails not only intellectually but also as plain theater. Like the apocalyptic space journey in Kubrick's very similarly structured 2001: A Space Odyssey, Willard's journey is designed as a psychedelic trip. Each stop along the way is meant to be more phantasmagoric than the last. In 2001, Kubrick successfully escalated his film at each stage, even topping the seemingly unbeatable light show with a more bizarre finale. Coppola, while creating progressively weirder war scenes, runs dry before he reaches his crucial imaginative leap: Kurtz's fastidiously designed compound looks as tame...
...narrative of the sculpture remains opaque (what is a figure of Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore in a bike helmet doing in the same place as the donkey-headed Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream?), but its intention is plain - to provoke a sense, as Segal puts it, of "terror, hallucination, nightmare...
None of this would be so painful if it was rip-off plain and simple. The rip-off, however, is a righteous one. Harvard may in fact hate America but it hates this guy a lot more...
...despite the best efforts of the Druzhba generation, it was plain last week that there will be problems in 1980. For ordinary tourists, the chief difficulties will be lack of time and flexibility. Most Americans will be on multicity package tours that include only five days in Moscow, usually not enough to follow an event from trials to finals. Tickets for sporting events, as well as for cultural activities be on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, though "barter booths" will be set up in hotel lobbies to allow spectators to swap unwanted tickets. There will be some agonizing...
...Maniototo is not necessarily plain in New Zealand's centeral Otago; the region may exist only in the wonderfully deranged mind of novel's narrator, herself a chimera of identities. She is, at various stages, Violet Pansy Proudlock, a ventriloquist: Mavis Barwell, widow of a French teacher turned debt collector; and Alice Thumb, a novelist...