Word: tedious
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Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky is, unfortunately, a tedious, though visually beautiful film by a great director. Alexander Nevsky is a patriotic Russian prince of the fifteenth century who drives out the Teutonic Knights, and the whole film is a transparent Russian nationalist allegory for the Second World War consisting almost entirely of battle scenes. For the first twenty minutes the sight of these elaborately armored and cross bedecked knights fighting in the snow seems breathtaking, but the effect soon wears off and cannot sustain the last two hours. Eisenstein made this film to please Stalin, making it possible...
...truth, of course, is that no parody is intended in The Widow's Children. The author sets her dismal characters in their tedious situation quite seriously, as if advancing the theory that any well-described vacuum constitutes a novel. The central non-event of the evening is that Laura's own mother Alma has died a few hours ago, but only Laura knows this. She refuses to tell anyone, presumably because the evening will seem even more pointless and ghastly when the truth finally is learned. "One has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual...
...that matter--so Nicholson simply wanders through Europe in an existential search for self-identity and the Meaning of Life, picking up a languid Maria Schneider en route. Only the film's visual beauty--Spanish landscape and Gaudi architecture shot in lush Italian style--in any way redeems this tedious monstrosity...
...mathematics, Appel and Haken's achievement may mean more than the end to a stubborn problem. Up to now, many theorists have been wary of using computers rather than simple, elegant blackboard equations to seek out basic mathematical truths; tedious chores like tracking a spacecraft, which involve no new principles, were left to the electronic brains. Now, by dramatically showing that there may be certain fundamental questions that only the high-speed electronic whizzes can answer, Appel and Haken may well have ushered in a new era of computer computation on the frontiers of higher mathematics...
Duplicating the gene's basic structure, which had been determined earlier by British researchers, was extremely tedious, trial-and-error work. Each scientist on Khorana's team was assigned to assemble 1% segments of DNA. This involved chemically linking one nucleotide to another, like beads of a necklace, until a chain ten to 12 nucleotides long had been created. Eventually the team built up 40 segments, all of them single stranded. These had to be paired to form double-stranded DNA segments that had to be connected end to end in proper sequence to duplicate the bacterial gene...