Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...transform high school graduation into a rite of mythic proportions. Lucas has moved on to more celestial myths, but his former partners remain preoccupied with the pangs of growing up. In French Postcards, Huyck and Katz try to create a true sequel to Graffiti: their new film is a rueful comedy about American students whose lives change dramatically during a year abroad. But this time the director is Huyck, not Lucas, and the results are deflating. French Postcards'comic anecdotes do not coalesce into a universal saga of postadolescence; they merely come across as a string...
Young love is a fanaticism inhabiting a region somewhere between the silly and the metaphysical. Scott Spencer understands the territory well: its shimmering landscapes, its enclosing solipsism, the profound and dippy magic by which children suddenly acquire passion. In Endless Love, the mother of one such adolescent says in rueful retrospect: "We felt as if we'd given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius-solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke...
...film is not a complete success. Muppet magic remains a bewildering succession of wonderful bits, and perhaps the movie's best occurs when Rowlf the Dog, who is a barroom pianist, commiserates with Kermit, who has just been deserted by Miss Piggy. The two sing a nice, rueful song about women-the can't-live-with-them, can't-live-without-them kind of thing. When Kermit slopes off into the night. Rowlf philosophizes: "It's not often you see a guy that green have the blues that...
Unfortunately, no amount of synthetic periplanone B is apt to stimulate an entire roach species into extinction. As rueful scientists have found in using pesticides, a few hardy roaches can usually survive a chemical spray because of some lucky genetic abnormality and will then propagate a new generation of spray-resistant offspring. Declares Entomologist Louis Roth, a pioneer in roach research: "The best we can hope for is to reduce their numbers...
...depraved sex and even talks to cats. He is the proverbial good man in a bad time (1971, approaching the end of Viet Nam) and a first-class bore. Even his day-to-day working life lacks thrills. Most of the time Gazzara just wanders about aimlessly with a rueful grin plastered on his face, much as he did in John Cassavetes' tedious The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Like all saints, though, Jack must be tempted by a truly immoral proposition: in the film's final stretch, a mysterious confidence man offers him $25,000 to blackmail...