Word: sputtering
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...creators of Roots 11 have only one remaining wish, and it cannot be granted by the tooth fairy. The wish, of course, is for high ratings. ABC research predicts an audience within six share points of Roots 1, but other network observers feel that Haley's comet could sputter slightly this time out. While the original Roots aired during a tame ratings period, Roots 11 appears at the peak of a Nielsen "sweeps" month, the all important period that determines advertising rates charged by network affiliate stations. NBC and CBS are spending $2 million each to combat Roots...
Still, if the little lives of individual people sputter too briefly for careful notice, clan characteristics do take on recognizable shape. There are the Steeds, wealthy Catholic landowners, tending to be intellectual; the Paxmores, steadfast Quaker shipbuilders: the Caters, solid, intelligent descendants of Cudjo: and the Turlocks, swamp trotters and poachers. Their interlocking fortunes and catastrophes never quite qualify for the terms "gripping" or "absorbing," but they are consistently diverting. Therein lies the author's secret: an attraction that lies not so much in the story as in a serene detachment from the story. The reader gets a four...
...fine ride, such as Cauthen's Preakness win, is composed of many parts, most of them beyond quantification. Horsemen sputter and maunder when asked to specify reasons for the success of the few truly great riders. Seat and balance, a clocklike sense of pace, strength, intelligence, courage, they say, and, most important, most mysterious of all, "the hands"?instinctive, intricately articulate, the medium of communication between horse and rider. Sometime, somehow, someone gets it all and then they say: "He's a natural...
...cast can strive for emotional honesty to compensate for a lack of maturity or finely-honed technique; Sleuth, however, is an exercise in style, and it demands a display of brazen theatrical exhibitionism, a roaring hamminess firmly entrenched in technical precision. The actors must savor Shaffer's dialogue, sputter and sing it in every conceivable register, deliver it with an awareness so heightened that the words become daggers. In the Leverett House production they do not; the dialogue is rattled off racehorse-style, reduced to snippy banter that makes Anthony Shaffer sound like a British Neil Simon...
...shot through with images of deformity and entrapment. Cunningham hunches down on the floor, all crippled angles, his head and tongue jerking like a lizard's. His hands tremble fitfully, one foot gropes outward in blind patterns, or--suddenly alert in awful stillness--he glances warily offstage. Movements sputter for a moment and die out helplessly; the fear is palpable, paralyzing. At the dance's end, when Cunningham shuffles offstage in the same pose as his entrance, nothing has changed or been resolved. But he is still moving, with the infinite dignity of a creature reconciled to dreadful pain...