Word: tedium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...would be an entrancing experience if she sang merely a C-major scale; yet I cannot help feeling that last Wednesday night her vocal gifts were put to the service of a rather stodgy and unimaginative program. This is not the place for a disquisition on the ghastly musical tedium guaranteed by the usual subscription concert (can anyone living in Boston ever want to hear the Symphonie Fantastique again?), but why, Miss de los Angeles, when Schubert wrote over six hundred songs, must we have yet another performance of An die Musik, and why when Ravel's Chansons madecasses...
...significance as a spiritual admonition, a memento mori. What's more, the frame reveals the picture as an extraordinary effort of style, as a definitive treatment of the themes Antonioni developed in L'Avventura and La Notte. As in those films, he employs the method of tedium to explain the nature of tedium, but he employs it so skillfully now that boredom is seldom boring. Vitti, as always, is endlessly fascinating, a luminous mannequin clothed with Antonioni's projections. And Delon is appropriately repulsive as a young man in a hurry. In the scenes at the stock...
Happily, a few islands rise above the morass of tedium. At the close of the Prologue near the beginning, An Actor strikingly initiates the change from major to minor; the orchestra follows. The hamming of Satan, Lucifer, and Astaroth in the Inferno and in Hell provides a pleasant relief, and the Virgin Mary has a delightful lyric song in Bethlehem in Part II ("My God, my sweet King...
...Clad only in signet ring and cigar, some of Germany's richest and most famed industrialists also frolic in the buff at exclusive North Sea beaches. What they all have in common, explains an earnest West German sociologist, is a need to escape from the tedium of the affluent society-"the craving to have something that everyone else doesn't have-or vice versa in this case." Nudism in Germany centers on the family. A husband can rarely become a card-carrying nudist unless his wife also joins the Free Body Culture Association...
...ultimate best, Mr. President is in dreadful shape at the present time. Dreadful is the only word; anything milder would be misleading, not to say dishonest. The further it goes, the more cumbersome and implausible it becomes, and long before the end it is bogged down in tedium. Never has Berlin written so many corny songs." Robert Ryan, as the President of the U.S.. turns out to resemble only Robert-not Harry, Herbert, Jack, Ike, Franklin, or even George. But Nanette Fabray is a sort of opera bouffant Jackie, generally lively and delightful. The story line at the center...