Word: sordidly
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...characters don't know their ultimate fate, they do determine their direction. Even "The Witnesses," the story nearest to tragedy (and one of Updike's best), portrays a mediocre man with a sexual itch who succeeds, much to the discomfort of his respectable friends, in weirdly legitimizing an actually sordid affair. In other hands, the material would be dreary, condescending; Updike makes it moving and unsettling...
...termination of the government's sordid intimidation of Popkin comes as a welcome surprise. But the conditions under which Popkin gained freedom represent no gain for First Amendment rights which have been trampled by the Nixon regime over the last four years...
Like their predecessors, the new immigrants perceive the true goddess of America, Technology, not as villain but as savior. The factory, however sordid or boring, has legally limited hours and, customarily, provides a string of fringe benefits. "Adam Smith" points out in Supermoney: "Somebody who has spent 16 hours a day looking at the wrong end of an ox for sub-subsistence on a patch in Poland may not complain at all when he emigrates with a paper suitcase to a steel mill on the South Side of Chicago." The message is quite clear: in the history of American immigration...
Rafelson's hero is David Staebler (Jack Nicholson), a late night radio monologuist who broadcasts private traumas packaged for cultural consumption. He leaves the sordid bachelor digs he shares with his grandfather in Philadelphia when summoned to Atlantic City by his brother Jason's telegram, "Get your ass down here. The Kingdom is come." The "Kingdom" turns out to be but a revived version of a boyhood fantasy: to take over Tiki island, one of the Hawaiian archipelago, build a casino and amass a fast fortune. The Staebler brothers spend the rest of the film trying to subsidize the dream...
...TELESCOPING A LIFE. Russell has descended to pure scandal-mongering. It is simply naive to explain artistic creation solety by sexual trauma, and cheap to elicit sympathy for an artist by the sordid expose of private scandal. Russell twists the facts and fabricates the milliew. The result is an hysterical film, rather than a film about hysteria. Even worse, Russell revels in his gossip--he has a fiesta turning a genuinely moving story into a turgid peephole show...