Word: spoiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Book-of-the-Month Club soon followed. Robert Redford's company has just bought the film rights. Judith Guest still does not have an agent, but with any luck she stands to collect something like half a million dollars. Will the resulting cash and carrying-on spoil things in the big, elm-shrouded house in the Minneapolis suburb where the author lives with her husband, three sports-mad sons aged 16, twelve and eleven, and a female malamute named Pax? "God, I hope not," says Ms. Guest. "I like...
...water off Sea Island, Ga., was so rough that the crew of a Coast Guard launch got seasick, but an ornery ocean was not going to spoil Jimmy Carter's vacation. He came back from a day at sea with his digestive system intact, a bonito of respectable size and the usual fisherman's lament: "You should have seen the one that got away. It was one of the largest cobias I've ever seen...
...final moments of Taxi Driver constitute one of those endings too good too spoil. Intellectually it's a trifle slick, a sort of cinematic illustration of the old Rolling Stones lyric about "just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints..." But if Scorsese teases us through the body of the movie with latent violence, he more than compensates for it in the final shootout--a rapid, graphic sequence of knives, bullets and blood, followed by a perversely loving, achingly detailed pan over the scene of the massacre. In this and in the epilogue, Scorsese achieves...
...tearful Mama is "You're a funny lady, Ma." Larry did not need New York to corrupt him; detachment and glib posturing must have come easily to him even before he bought his first authentic-looking French beret. Still, the image would be all right if Mazursky did not spoil the effect by having his mother reply, "My life has not been very funny." Something lurks beneath this array of facades, but Mazursky will never let us see what is there...
Mollenhoff is a dexterous craftsman, but sometimes the progression of the book is lost in a flood of details which encumber the reader and threaten to spoil the clarity of the author's argument. The presence of numerous passages from old Des Moines Register issues leaves one with the suspicion that Mollenhoff enjoys pulling old columns from his scrapbook every so often in search of a good quote. The pace slackens especially during the last third of the narrative, where the morass of Watergate-related comings and goings leaves the reader with a "deja vu" feeling; a wish to escape...