Word: stupidly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...failed to provide a decent base, for their play is as black and white as the actors' costumes. After five minutes no one doubts that boobery is the best that the leaders can manage, that soldiers are great guys if only left alone, and that war is a pretty stupid business. Spare fare indeed, especially when larded with such banalities as the British general praying to God for victory "before the Americans come." Also, using thirty-one songs from the war period, although an effective stimulant to nostalgia, reduces the area of irony so important to satire, leaving the worn...
Such reporting is prone to distortions. The complicated greys of a complicated country fade into oversimplified blacks and whites. To Saigon's Western press corps, President Ngo Dinh Diem is stubborn and stupid, dominated by his brother and sister-in-law. As a result, the correspondents have taken sides against all three; they seldom miss a chance to overemphasize the ruling family's Roman Catholicism. The press corps' attitude automatically assigns justice and sympathy to the side of the Buddhists, who are well aware of their favored position. Before the first bonze set fire to himself...
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa got interested in the movies because they seemed to him unnecessarily stupid. Rashomon was his tenth picture, and since Rashomon he has produced a relentless succession of masterpieces. Seven Samurai (1954), considered by many the best action movie ever made, is a military idyl with a social moral: the meek shall inherit the earth-when they learn to fight for their rights. Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa's greatest work, describes the tragedy and transfiguration of a hopelessly ordinary man, a grubby little bookkeeper who does not dare to live until he learns he is going...
...tells jokes with a message. Too often the message scrapes through, but the humor does not. He is a dedicated slayer of cliche philosophies. "Don't change horses in midstream," he scoffs. "Did you ever take two horses into the middle of a stream? That is stupid in itself. But I tried it, and you know, the second one was better." Somebody digs. Mason gets top bookings...
...teachers batty. Most teachers aim to tame them by putting "your foot on their neck," and by spooning out futilely alien education from pap-filled primers that extol civilized white virtues. As a result, Maori kids tend to hate reading, fall behind in school, and wind up being labeled "stupid." It is just such frustration (or repression), argues Teacher, that leads some Maoris to become neurotics, brawlers, defeatists and alcoholics...