Word: putdown
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...Family Plot should be considered as fleetingly as possible. It is a comedy thriller gone awry, vulgar, lifeless and maladroit. The script is by Ernest Lehman, who wrote the witty screenplay for Hitchcock's sumptuous self-parody, North by Northwest. Here the writing is less like satire than putdown. At one point, Bruce Dern, who plays a scuffling actor/cab driver named Lumley, grouses to his girl friend, a self-proclaimed medium: "You've really got me by the crystal balls...
...Abmaphid. The abundance of humor provides constant comic relief. It has an enormously supple range, by turns sophisticated, acid, intellectual, putdown, cynical, broad, black and even sick. The two leads are superb. Dewhurst does not need to bray "I am the Earth Mother." We know it on sight. We sense that a Samson might have won her respect but never an "Abmaphid ... A.B. ... M.A. ... Ph.D." As "the bog in the history department," Gazzara's professorial George is detached but not desiccated. His wry grin portends revenge. He is a much trodden worm with a cobra's fangs...
...Public Putdown. The wisecrack was an extraordinary bit of prenegotiation banter and an embarrassingly public putdown of Kissinger. Still, after eight hours of bargaining with Brezhnev across a felt-topped table and another four hours of talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Kissinger left Moscow with something to show for his journey...
Emboldened by the failure of an abortive radical coup, Portugal's moderates took charge last week in what might fairly be called a middle-road revolution. Since the putdown of the Nov. 25 leftist plot, more than 100 officers and soldiers have been arrested and flown to a safe prison in Oporto. Other radical officers and civilians fled the country, as did a scruffy mob of youthful revolutionary groupies from other nations in Western Europe, who had flocked to Lisbon to help the cause. "It's dreadful," complained one beautiful Swedish blonde. "The revolution's over...
...Public Purpose, published in 1973, which argued for a "new socialism"-Galbraith has seemed tediously preachy. In Money he has recovered the gently acerbic touch that he displayed as a reformist capitalist, and that made popular such books as The Affluent Society and the New Industrial State. Sample putdown: "Those who talk of money and teach about it and make their living by it gain prestige, esteem and pecuniary return, as does a doctor or a witch doctor, from cultivating the belief that they are in privileged association with the occult ... Though professionally rewarding and personally, profitable, this...