Word: tediousness
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...Science moves, but slowly slowly," complained Tennyson, "creeping on from point to point." Just so, and generations of students have been unwilling to walk the tedious trail that might eventually lead to a career in the laboratory. The loss is society's, and the answer to the horrors of a Three Mile Island or a Love Canal is not clamping down on science, but training more and better scientists. This remarkable PBS series is a welcome attempt to answer that need. Science, it says, is not only the world's biggest game; it is also the most exciting...
Only once does the comic energy flag and seriousness take over: a series of afflicted towns-people visits Khlestakov, and on a dimly lit stage two women plead for his assistance in tedious, unexpectedly serious tones. It seems like a screwed-up bit of pacing. But then a macabre, unforgettable vision appears: a group of eerie, frazzled black scarecrows in a Brownian movement behind the transparent plastic sheet that forms the stage's rear boundary, staring at Khlestakov like a second, ghostly audience. In his impenetrable complacency, he can ignore them with a wave of his hand...
...tedious waiting in hot and crowded quarters tested tempers beyond the breaking point. Fights broke out when some of the refugees claimed they had spotted Castro spies in their midst. More jostling occurred when refugees scrambled to get on the buses for Miami. National Guardsmen locked arms to push back 400 trying to get into a single bus. Barked an exasperated sergeant through a megaphone: "You waited 21 years to come to America. Now you can wait four hours...
...result is a sometimes tedious, fitfully organized Rashomon-styte film that intersperses scenes purporting to show how the princess lived with what are presented as interviews with people who knew her and her world. In fact, all the characters in the film, which was shot mainly in Egypt, are actors. What they say about the princess and the indolent ways of Saudi royals is distilled from what Thomas claims to be 300 hours of conversation with well-placed Arabs and other sources (though he spent only two weeks in Saudi Arabia itself). What irritates the Saudis, besides the film...
...lack of purpose. It is as if he is looking through a window at an unknown world which he realizes is important and real--but is unsure why he is looking at it. After ten minutes of this hour-long black-and-white film, the disjointedness becomes tedious...