Word: sillier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity...
Perfect because the right has staked out an indefensible ground, because the forces of respectability, order and capital look sillier than usual. Jeane Kirkpatrick, current ambassador to the United Nations, began to outline the current ideological position of the right in her 1979 Commentary article, which included these lines: "The relative lack of concern of rich comfortable rulers for the poverty, ignorance, and disease of 'their' people is likely to be interpreted by Americans as moral dereliction pure and simple...Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society...
This climax neatly parodies one of the sillier conventions of romantic thrillers, but the picture is rarely that delicately tuned. Ugo Tognazzi remains a marvel of sympathetic understatement as the, er, straight man, but Michel Serrault's performance has a forced, even panicky quality here, perhaps because his role is not as well written as it was the first time, lacking as it does both sympathy and well-made gags. Director Molinaro handles most of the action scenes perfunctorily, never realizing their full value either as suspense or as comedy. Since no one has bothered to think up anything...
When Baptist Jimmy Carter admitted to Playboy magazine that he had violated Christ's commandment against lust in the heart a time or two, it produced one of the sillier sideshows of the 1976 presidential campaign. Now John Paul II, in a public comment that drew on the very same New Testament text, has stirred an equally unholy...