Word: staled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...praised it to General Washington, who later described it as "an effort of genius." But Bushnell has been having trouble with the vessel: the pump broke down and had to be replaced; the ventilator had to be altered to draw in fresh air through one tube and eject stale air through another. To help out, the Connecticut Council of Safety decided last February to award Bushnell £60 to carry on his work...
...Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety ... other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies." Even the vows that she and Antony swear in lovers' defiance of the world are thunderously imperial. Says Antony: "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!" and Cleopatra echoes, "Melt Egypt into Nile...
...throughout the South and West, claustrophobic, smoke-filled little places with sawdust on the floors--places where if you look someone in the eye you're prepared to fight or say, "Gee, I thought you were a buddy of mine. Can I get you a beer?" They smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke, with maybe a tinge of reefer wafting up from a distant corner, and there's always puke on the floor, it seems. And out in every parking lot is a half-crazed drunken fool loading a pistol in a half-paid-for pick-up truck...
...avoiding caricature. On the other hand, the necessity of shifting abruptly from one worker to another in order to let each piece together his neat characterization by installment, and the perpetual interplay of the remaining characters, camped on the edges of your attention, keeps the scene from going stale. Almost all the actors, however minor, develop distinctive and suggestive mannerisms that make you look out for them during certain incidents, and there's a pleasant kind of satisfaction in seeing them react as you suspected they might...
...implications of the film live and die in 1941. Its political overtones never acquire palpable contemporary significance--which one senses is what Costa-Gavras was after but missed. The vitality and importance of a film like Z is lacking in Special Section. What happened in Vichy seems like a stale story; but what happened in Greece during the dictatorship was genuinely tragic. There's nothing really wrong with making more than one film about political repression, but in a world where political repression easily wins prizes for the most popular form of government, a director like Costa-Gavras should stick...