Word: vaines
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...troops borrowed 80 pots and pans, uprooted 2,037 trees and took 3,150 logs to help transport their cannons across the snow-covered Great St. Bernard Pass. Napoleon sent an IOU promising, "I will reimburse everything." Since then the citizens of Bourg St. Pierre have been trying in vain to collect the 30,254 gold francs they say they are owed. When President François Mitterrand visited Switzerland last year, they politely reminded him of the outstanding debt. They did not ask for a specific sum, however, because with compound interest the amount would have reached tens...
...once, the opposition refused to shrug off such election chicanery. As members of the government-dominated election commission inexplicably dawdled over counting votes, demonstrators conducted a candlelight march on Manila's city hall, waving placards that proclaimed, NINOY, YOU HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN!, TALLY SHEET, NOT TALLY CHEAT! and ONE VOTE, ONE COUNT! In the capital's commercial center of Makati, a recount took away the victory of UNIDO Candidate Aurora ("Au-Au") Pijuan-Manotoc, 34, the former wife of Sportsman Tommy Manotoc, who is now married to the President's daughter Imee...
...preens before his eager court. In the third and strongest act, he leaps around the world in search of Cinderella in spectacular grand jetés. In the best vignette, he copes insouciantly with violent would-be princesses who wrestle with him for the precious slipper. A bit vain, lacking perhaps ideal royal tolerance, he is at heart a good egg, and better company for a full-length fairy tale in 1984 than the standard, hand-wringing Adonis. -By Martha Duffy
Despite this exuberance, the novel might have benefited from more scenes with the only character sufficiently outsize to compete with the film maker: his driving, obsessive mother. The focus of the novel is Larry Lazar's awareness that his whole life has been a vain effort to win her explicit approval, and in her too brief scenes she dominates the story as effectively as she rules the family around her. Still, there is not a false note in the whole shrill song, and in its balanced skewering of Brooklyn and Beverly Hills, The Return of Mr. Hollywood may launch...
...costumes lights actors and a supporting crew. But there is little to catch the audience's emotion or to engage their sympathies. The occasional bits of humor surprising enough to make one laugh out load seem oddly out of place. One looks for glimmer5s of human feeling but in vain...