Word: static
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, difficult to define, few of them more than a page long, meditations on images in Cuban history. At worst they resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies. Each one presents a static image or a brief moment. To explain the colonial period, for example, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave...
...where is the genius Sid Caesar now? He once made us all go into frenzied tribal dances of laughter in front of our television screens. People hurt themselves, they laughed so hard. Bring back the huge, rubber-faced dynamo. His endless energy was a war on the static, the complacent and the passively stupid. When Sid Caesar was stupid, he was actively stupid...
...Thin Man. If you haven't, you must. It's as tight as the book and moves with a drive which insures that its charm is never static. Everything in this picture seems always to be in mad, advancing motion: elevators, eyebrows martinis--all pushing to the final clinch. The movie looks wonderful, so does everyone in it. When Myrna Loy wrinkles her nose it makes you wait for weeks to see a girl at a party who's got that talent. Nick and Nora Charles, it's repeated often, were modeled on Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. That spirit...
...American identity--is potentially workable, even exciting. What mars its execution, however, is Bercovitch's overfondness for long, convoluted sentences punctuated with Latin expressions, his heavy use of quotations, and the slowness with which he moves from concept to concept. Together these flaws give his prose a muddy, static quality...
Mary Stuart is a static, talky play, and Chapman has done little to disturb its stateliness. Keeping the pace slow, he instead relies on the dramatic excitement generated by his two leads to give the play momentum. It's a strategy that works well when the queens are soliloquizing or confronting each other, but inevitably breaks down when the men take over...