Word: pretenders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most people don't want to live in a society that actually tries to make life as normal as we pretend. Or a society that stops us from pretending to more normality than we achieve. Not that everybody is an adulterer or a perjurer. Perhaps there are people who have nothing to be ashamed of. Even they have messes and complications. Is there anybody with no secrets he or she would be tempted to commit perjury for? That's not a blanket excuse for perjury. But when the perjury was a your-secrets-or-your-life stickup staged...
...weak and so on. The anti-Clinton vengeance seekers claim to hate the sin while loving the sinner, but their hatred of the sinner is so obvious and so extreme that it even casts doubt on how much they actually hate the sin. Most people don't even pretend to love this particular sinner. But they see how a guy can go from succumbing to momentary temptation to lying about it to a grand jury, and they see it as a seamless human story, not as a series of discrete actions. That's why the Starr report's prurient narrative...
...Clara, prancing about onstage in the swirliest dress with the best doll and dancing that breathtaking (and romantic?) duet with the Nutcracker Prince? Some of the intensely traditional ballet's parts, however, may ring a bit uncomfortable with audiences today--all the little boys receive guns and promptly pretend to shoot one another, while all the little girls receive dolls and are content to sit and rock them. Yet despite borderline-misogynistic scenes like this, the first few scenes exude a delightful sweetness found in only the prettiest of children's tales...
...Rugrats creators pretend to be sanguine about the cluttered calendar. Says Gabor Csupo, the Lugosi-accented Hungarian who with ex-wife Arlene Klasky launched the show in 1991: "The biggest problem is most of the time for children there is nothing of quality their whole family can enjoy. I love competition. It's healthy--it makes everybody work harder and do better work. The strong will survive. If you have a kid, they at least want to go every second weekend to the movies. So there are plenty of weekends from now until the Christmas season for every quality film...
...confusing set-up unfortunately detracts from the production. The actors, for instance, walk onto the stage through the audience, often distorting reality. It is difficult to see Mattie, in the epilogue, walk through the audience and climb right onto the stage, only to pretend to be paralyzed from a sledding accident. Although we all fundamentally realize that what happens on the stage is not reality, the opera Ethan Frome could use some fine tuning--from the unpolished scene changes to the deficient set to the fact that one might have a better view of the orchestra than the stage...