Word: pseudo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Arthur Rex features hard-boiled knights in a pseudo-Arthurian landscape, and the clash of styles has the discordant ring of crossed lances at a joust. His heroes talk obsessively of "paps" and "mammets" (not, as Berger supposes, a variant of mammaries, but a medieval reference to Muhammad). The labored effort to reproduce Malory's diction is a disaster. Horses are "sore thirsty," kings are "some vexed," lusty knights "swyve" damsels, addressed elsewhere as "chicks." Launcelot is said to have "filled a need for the queen," a disheartening summation of one of the world's most fabled love...
...fomented as recently as 1976 in Mexico City. (The CIA calls the allegations of a Mexico City plot "absolutely untrue.") The main impact of these exposes on spectators was widespread narcolepsy; they were occasionally awakened by brisk applause from the army of Communist and Third World reporters covering the pseudo event...
...difficult to believe? Have not the worst atrocities of the 20th century all been committed in the name of some perverse pseudo science, usually during efforts to create a new heaven on earth, or even a "new man"? The Nazi notion of racial purity led inexorably to Auschwitz and the Final Solution. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sent millions to their deaths in the name of a supposedly moral cause-in their case, the desired triumph of socialism. Now the Cambodians have taken bloodbath sociology to its logical conclusion. Karl Marx declared that money was at the heart...
...present temptation is to think only of Italy as the place where the pseudo anarchists strike with bolder and bolder feats or abductions. We have a vague notion that Italy has the monopoly on banditry−bandit being of Italian origin−and that kidnaping is as much part of the Italian scene as opéra bouffe. (The great master of English opéra bouffe, W.S. Gilbert, was kidnaped as a baby in Naples−an event both Neapolitan and Gilbertian.) And it is true that it has traditionally been hard to think of Italy as tranquil...
...Oscars and has left millions sobbing away for poor Natalie Wood. Steal "Romeo and Juliet"--or borrow it under the pretense of "relevantizing" it (as if it weren't already relevant), throw in some beautiful and awful songs and bits of schlockified Copland by Leonard Bernstein, give it a pseudo-daring "tough" script by ol' Arthur Laurents.... well, the ingredients are right for a classic stage, and then film musical. The Whites against the Puerto-Ricans here (you notice there are no blacks--it would be illegal for Natalie Wood to go black-face), and the damn thing...