Word: talentless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nerve-and then again there is nerve. The kind they have lots of -too much of-in television is exhibited in its ripest form this week (NBC, Wednesday, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) by Jack Lemmon, starring in a remake of John Osborne's The Entertainer. Archie Rice, that talentless, foul-spirited denizen of show biz's low depths, is, of course, the creation and sole property of Laurence Olivier-perhaps the greatest performance in a nonclassic role by the man who is our age's prince of players. There is no hope of duplicating what...
...answers to this question are bottled up in a season of dissension, unhappiness, and lost ballgames. Harvard's basketball team was far from talentless this past year, yet it could not even once get it together on the court for an effort it could really be proud...
...didn't turn out that way because the Bruins were talentless. They aren't. It didn't happen because the 1975 Crimson football team is one of the finest outfits ever to play the game. It isn't. What happened was that team which doesn't know how to win the big game ran into one that expects to win every important contest it encounters...
...range partially conceal this tension. The stories run from a page to thirty, at one point in stream-of-consciousness imitation of a bourgeois psychotic and at another, in the ostensibly reasonable tones of a well-read intellectual. Humor is consistently sardonic: clever when discussing the posturing of a talentless college professor in his quest to publish his book and vindictive when describing a dinner of the haute bourgeoisie ("Nothing tasted. From course to course I'd swallowed textures, not tastes, like a cat gobbling kill...
Indeed De Palma is particularly tough on the youths who invite people like Swan to swindle them. They are observed to grow as hysterical over a talentless transvestite swinger named Beef (played in the film's gaudiest comic turn by Gerrit Graham) as they do over the pure loveliness of Phoenix's voice. A wedding onstage turns them on, but so does an assassination. "That's entertainment!" Swan cries, and no one challenges his all-purpose definition of the term. The terrible possibility exists that he is right-that nowadays all turn-ons are equally transitory...