Word: pompously
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Quite appropriately, he chose to tell the story of a man (William Randolph Hearst) who shared his talent for big ideas and big success. And yet, he did not take the easy way out and laugh at Kane for the pompous megalomaniac that he was; he strove to make him a human being instead of a straw man like the one Andy Griffith played in A Face in the Crowd, a movie vaguely reminiscent of Kane. Indeed, Welles could never be called supersubtle in his characterization of Kane as a love-starved neurotic, but then he entirely avoids simple caricature...
...point, Leacock pokes fun at orthodox newsreels. He shows four or five men hovering around Kennedy, posing him for a canned, two-minute statement. After the intimacy that Leacock has put on the screen, this formal sitting seems as turgid and pompous as a commencement address...
Ulrik Brendel, an old mentor of Rosmer's whose life has corroded through his own illusory ambitions, was given a Chaplinesque twist by Joel Henning. As Professor Kroll, the pompous but observant conservative, Richard B. Stone heroically varies his redundant lines. Had he used his torso as flexibly, the visual effect would have been similarly less monotonous. Joel Crothers as the opportunistic radical leader whose dreams never exceed his political capabilities, and Beryl Kinross-Wright as a housekeeper, turn in two excellent performances...
...some of Wilson's longer poems, one seems to be reading the pompous Latin hexameters of a precocious college class poet, translated by himself much later into would-be lively English. Thus the verse manages to suffer simultaneously from "if youth but knew" and "if age but could." Other poems become wearying concatenations of assonances and alliterations in esoteric meters. At best, Wilson achieves a kind of chirky colloquialism. A characteristic sample...
...junta is doggedly unsentimental. Engagement rings and dowries are out. Funeral services may no longer be pompous, lengthy and expensive as in the past, but should be brisk, cheap and austere; among other things, the custom of bowing three times before the funeral altar will be streamlined down to a single bow. Newly forbidden is the use of wooden, disposable chopsticks in Korea's 11,676 restaurants and teahouses-the government wants to conserve the country's dwindling timber reserves; instead, the use and reuse of plastic chopsticks is urged...