Word: staled
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...Hitchcock calls them all chilling. Several are. But too many remain simply unpleasant, falling far short of anything original and bizarre; too many seem stale or trite rather than shocking or even pleasantly uncomfortable...
...play of violent action or of individual detachment. A stale retired professor (Serebriakov), his young wife (Elena), and the daughter (Sonia), brother (Vanya), and mother of his first wife live cramped lives on a faded Russian estate. A visitor, the overworked local doctor (Astrov) wanders in and out of the household. Sonia loves the doctor, who is unaware of her as a woman. Vanya, who feels oppressed and trapped, shares with the doctor a love for Elena, who is quite miserable with her old and pompous husband. The doctor dreams of forestry and the future, yet sees his education...
...sorriest aspect of Uncle Willie is not that its story makes Abie's Irish Rose seem positively avantgarde; it is not even its stale and stupid quips, but rather its greasy benevolence. Fairly often, to be sure. Actor Skulnik shakes himself free from it: with a demonstration of how to walk so that shoes will not wear out, with a tale of how each month his landlord pays him rent, with a mere shrug or grunt or monosyllable, he can be a delight. But oftener he struggles, like a boxer, to outpoint his material, or like a magician...
...nimbleness, the knowingness, the irony, the sharp observation of small-town life in all this has hardly been surpassed on the screen. Moreover, there is a sense of the unpredictable flow of life, even though in Vitelloni it is only the sloshing of stale water in a very small pot, that gives to everything Fellini does a kind of tidal vitality. Fellini sees his people straight and whole, most warmly and naturally loves them and hates them, and takes them as they are. It is one measure of Fellini's superiority to most of his neorealist colleagues...
...Apple Cart, written in 1929, was perhaps the last of Shaw's plays to kick up any real dust in the theater. Indeed, it marks the point in his career when Shaw began to collect dust as well as kick it up, began to seem stale as well as brilliant. Less the work of a master than of a past master, The Apple Cart still had vital things to say and on occasion a great gift for saying them. There was still the fun of watching a superb showman up to his old tricks-but some of them...