Word: turgidity
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...such bright spots mainly show how good Gromyko's book might have been had he not chosen to keep his tail between his legs. Memoirs is too often a turgid history cum travelog speckled with diplomatic slavishness. "Staff at the Foreign Ministry did not discuss the purge trials," he says of the Stalinist era. "As diplomats, we avoided the subject." As a result, his book is destined for the dustheap of famous-people-I-have-met books...
...style is Leibowitz's rationale for this book, then it seems an unfortunate consequence the turgid, academic prose he has chosen to express his own. Between the pages of plot summary, the endless intellectual bragging and the almost repetitive invocations of some nebulous American national "identity," Fabricating Lives gets lost in its own pretentiousness...
Woodward's best seller, though it traced Belushi's last days with a doggedness that would have done the Evangelists proud, was a turgid read that had little feeling for its subject and found no broad meaning in it. At least adapter Earl Mac Rauch (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) knows that the only way to pin Belushi and Hollywood is to wax satiric and surrealistic. When the dead Belushi prowls his old haunts in a morgue sheet that looks like a toga out of the Animal House closet, the film almost has style to match its guts. So does...
...little gray city of turrets and spires, cathedrals, castles and university complexes, bookstores and pubs. Between a hill of cutout ruins and the turgid North Sea rests the Old Course in its original and only form, where golf has been played since the 12th century. Every course has 18 holes only because this one does...
...known commodities: Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Director Harold Prince (Cabaret, Follies) have mounted some of the flashiest spectaculars of recent years, including their prior collaboration, Evita. Practically everyone, it seems, has seen a movie version of Phantom, although few have read Gaston Leroux's turgid 1910 thriller about the hideously misshapen genius who constitutes himself the shadow ruler of the Paris Opera House and, upon becoming infatuated with a chorine, maneuvers her career from afar. The beauty-and-the- beast theme and subterranean wonderland setting echo the myths of Persephone, Pygmalion and Faust and also...