Word: shrill
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...Kosy as a fantasy-spinning child. She takes a potentially pedestrian part and makes it fly, in a technically superb performance. Her fifteen-minute sequence is almost worth seeing for its own sake. But the remainder of the cast is undistinguished. Joanna Temple accentuates the already brittle, shrill tenor of Toni's role. Sheila Greene as Nina does little to pry her part loose from its rather uninspired box. Only Joan Trachtman as Toni's mother seems unhappily tethered to a very limited script. One senses she could do a great deal more with the part, given a little room...
...scars of childbirth and abortion; men have etched humiliation on their souls. Faced with her husband's latest infidelity, Chloe decides to spend a day in London visiting Marjorie and Grace. They too are in their early 40s, their pasts a stream of errors. Grace has become a shrill hoyden, Marjorie an asexual careerist. They bicker and discuss each other's failings with a cool dispassion usually reserved for inanimate objects...
Unlike his Rockefeller counterpart, who metamorphosed unnoticeably from the strict Baptist faith of his grandfather to the tepid, gently-theistic civil religion so at home recently in the White House, Lamont turned into a shrill, at times evangelical Humanist. Not just a fly in the smooth ointment of his family's liberal Protestantism, but a gadfly among the "New Philosophers," correcting Dewey's semantics and grammar here, rescuing George Santayana from an ignominious Vatican tomb-marker there, always, always proselytizing for the American Humanist Association, the Ethical Union of America, and other similar religious-philosophical organizations...
...allowed to forget Watergate for long. As he put it, he had "to walk a very fine line." Occasionally, he stepped over it. At first, he was almost an unabashed apologist for the President's defense strategy and once even used language supplied by White House speechwriters for a shrill attack on "groups like the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action and other powerful pressure organizations." He accused them of "waging a massive propaganda campaign against the President of the United States." In subsequent speeches, he called for more openness on the part of the President and greater cooperation...
...along comes Steve Krantz, producer of Fritz and likewise of this sequel - as squalid and witless an assembly of animation as could be imagined. By comparison, the Bakshi version looks like Fantasia. To escape the shrill accusations of his wife, Fritz drifts off into cannabis reveries where his libido can run unchecked and where his paranoia eventually assumes control. He idles back to the high-stepping 1930s, then works his way up to the present and a visit with a Bowery bum, whom he accidentally immolates. In the film's most elaborate episode, he eases himself off into...