Word: unrealism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unreal for life, He Who Gets Slapped lacks the true overtones of art. Perhaps it suggests that a circus is but a smaller version of the world, and as misleadingly gay a one; perhaps it shows how people love to dramatize pain, how grossness is always buying up beauty. But none of this, is new, whatever the '20s had thought, and it is not made compelling. It is only, at its best, made spectacular...
Truckline Cafe wholly muffed a chance to give dramatic, or even melodramatic force to a timely theme. In its casual moments it was flaccid, in its crucial ones unreal. Playwright Anderson's small army of bit parts had an effect of shambling vaudeville. His main story became a hollow study of two people speaking high-busted clichés. Too often, as in the past, he slubbed words into what was neither poetic language nor human speech...
...card playing, automobiles) and modern dress. They gave a mild fillip to a classic story, but they did not make for an effective play. This Antigone, barring its one big clash between despot and defier, was flat, fumbly theater. This Antigone, shorn of her Resistance aura, was unmoving and unreal. And in a modernish setting, the burial issue on which the plot hinges seemed outlandishly bizarre...
Bevin rose above their level, tossed aside the numbing, ambiguous grandiloquence of traditional diplomacy which made international dialogue sound remote and unreal. He spoke as no statesman had ever spoken before in international councils. He spoke, and his example made others speak, as though UNO were not a precarious assembly of many nations, but a parliament of respectable and genuine power. He spoke up to the Russians as a great many plain people in pubs and corner drugstores had often wanted to speak. Gasped one European delegate: "My God! We are playing chess, and Bevin is playing darts...
...audience to use only one eye-the eye trained on the world of make-believe. Documentary movies often ignore that eye, sometimes too self-righteously, and concentrate on the other eye-the one trained on the actual world. At their worst, documentaries turn actuality into something insufferably boring and unreal. At their best, they give reality a new clarity and beauty...