Word: turgidity
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...roster of Acting Professors is inevitable: Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close. The tone of their films can turn turgid in their insistence on beating moral lessons into thick skulls. And in a limited genre one can easily lose track of who is playing what role, and why. Here is Streep as the troubled survivor of a traumatic World War II episode. Sophie's Choice? No, Plenty. Lange stars as a trailblazing country singer of the '60s who has a truculent husband and a few brushes with disaster. A remake of Loretta Lynn and Coal Miner's Daughter...
...word neo-expressionism is misapplied to American art in the '80s. The marks that convey heaviness and heat -- turgid, lava-like floods of paint, fulgurous color, primitive and mythic imagery, and the like -- are, as any art student knows by now, conventional signs that can be (and usually are) manipulated as lightly and coldly as Coke bottles in a Warhol. In this republic, the "expressive" comes down to another form of pop art, retooled for an audience strung out on fictions of personal authenticity...
Penderecki has written two operas on religious subjects: The Devils of Loudun (1969) and Paradise Lost (1978), which the composer has called a Sacra Rappresentazione rather than a conventional opera. Paradise Lost, commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was the victim of a turgid production that obscured the work's many beauties. Messiaen's Saint François-which resembles no other work in the operatic literature as much as it resembles Paradise Lost in its static, quasi-oratorio quality- is more fortunate all around...
...example, of his stint as a construction foreman; the workers would lay some cable one day, get drunk, take it out the next, get drunk, and so on ad nauseam. He was eventually fired because he made the system more efficient--be dispensed with the cable altogether. The turgid rhetoric of state propaganda is lampooned in the workers' hypocritical socialist pledges, but the humor does not eclipse more sinister themes: "I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride...They harbour no thought--but what power...
...Nixon's analysis gets lost in his effort to distill these dual ideas, especially in his discussions of Third World leaders. Here, for instance, "stubborn adherence to socialism" is the lynchpin for his criticisms of people like Nehru or Nasser, his too-brief analyses of these figures are left turgid and unrevealing...