Word: throwaways
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Hemphill owes a great deal to writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in the devices he uses to make his articles work. He usually starts and ends each with a carefully constructed scene or conversations instead of the kind of throwaway catch-phrase that prevails in feature journalism, and he tries to catch the minutiae and inflections of speech that best reveal his subjects. At times, his debt to Wolfe becomes embarrassingly apparent in its magnitude, especially in his stock-car pieces, which always echo Wolfe's classic "The Last American Hero." The Wolfe style does have its limits...
...haunted, weepy, torn-apart teacher. What is immediately apparent is that the emotional ground between parents and sons has been land-mined. Affections that are not actually felt are masked in billboards ("To the finest mother and the finest dad") while genuine feelings of tenderness are muted in throwaway lines or not uttered at all. There is a lacerating poignance in this...
...invokes the weight of spurious administrative duties to dodge yet another tutorial. He never allows the irony to become too heavy at moments like that; he always keeps quite the proper balance, making the ruse believable but also hypocritically funny. He is also a master of the throwaway and can brush off a fast line like a piece of dandruff off his rumpled suit. Confronted with a thick M.A. thesis entitled "Henry James and the Crucified Consciousness," he examines it quickly, notes that it is laid out "like a film scenario," and tosses it aside with the assurance that...
...tapes belonged to him and could never be wrested from him. The existence of the recorders was originally known only to a few Secret Service technicians and three trusted aides: Haldeman, Lawrence Higby and Alexander Butterfield. It was Butterfield who startlingly revealed the system in response to a throwaway question from a Senate Watergate-committee staff counsel on July 13. Even then the President must undoubtedly have felt that he could still protect the tapes with his claims of Executive privilege. Indeed, there had been discussions among those privy to the system about dismantling the recorders as early...
...more muted than it might have been without the efforts of Slide and Tanner. It also winds up as a small but authentic surprise gift for audiences. Miss Hawn's performance is rather too obviously calculated, but her male co-stars-Atherton, Sacks and Johnson-are adroit throwaway artists. The script neatly balances action, suspense and soft-spoken humor. Best of all, 26-year-old Director Steven Spielberg, in his first feature after a promising start in TV, emerges as a man to watch. It is easy to patronize and satirize simple, down-homish material, even easier to sentimentalize...