Word: reductios
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plots from great philosophers is a quick way to get out of the movie business, but this time the borrower is René Clair (Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million), a man as skillful with pictures as Pascal was with ideas. The result is a wonderfully natty little reductio ad absurdum-"all bird," as one observer put it, "and no stuffing...
Unfortunately, the other three prose attempts do not measure up to the first two. Taking a poor third, is one of those Daisy-turned-Gridder things that can be funny only at high school football banquets. And then there's "The Peanuts Myth" that uses the reductio ad absurd to no great advantage. This particular one involves nineteenth-century Ivy athletes playing football in motorized wheelchairs. Hindmost in the magazine and in humor is "Informality at Yale," an ironic title because John H. Limpert says that the Yale men "Gothic town" do not have much informality. An "Old College Song...
...wife says, "Coming home drunk, well, I'll give you apiece of my mind." Holloway counters with "It will have to be a very small piece, you don't have much to spare." Such exchanges continue with a regularity and plane of wit that is indeed wonderful. The reductio ad absurdum of "Ways and Means," a parasite couple of the international set who induce a burglar to rob their hostess is a pleasant cordial to end the film. Valeric Hobson and Nigel Patrick play the leads...
...Review is not a social organization where membership is subject to private whim. It is a board composed of the professionally superlative. To deny membership for personal reasons has no place in the scope of its work. It is inescapable as the reductio ad absurdum of such a proposition that the academically inferior five percent will inherit the organ through denial of privilege to those who earned the invitation and the opportunity to prove themselves...
...could be a terrifying play in what the fantasies of a Tarkingtonian small boy could give rise to in a totalitarian society: the scene in The Emperor's Clothes where two goons grill the father about Hoot Gibson's war on "the cattle barons is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of police state methods. But what might have been a brilliantly sardonic social satire has first been squeezed inside a domestic framework and then dropped from the picture itself. Though the family story has its own realistic interest, it is never made real. Mixing and garnishing his moods...