Word: vapid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this year in film has ushered forth two unquestionably vapid Daisies, plucked from two unquestionably fertile literary minds, played by two unquestionably beautiful women. First to be deflowered was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow plays the role with all of its attendant splendour and graceful, but inevitably brutish, carelessness. Farrow maintains a delicate balance between a gay childishness with her illicit lover, Gatsby, and a wanton callousness, a total disregard for anybody's feelings. Henry James's novella, Daisy Miller, adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich, is a portrait of exactly that...
Which brings up a third question: what are those warts? After all, it is the substance of this journal-and-commentary that makes the enterprise objectionable, and not just the from alone. The form is strained, ungraceful and disjointed, but if the substance were not quite so vapid, strained and lacking in grace, perhaps the book would be passably tolerable. If Prescott should be locked up, it is not for the book he has written--which is not that bad. Rather, he should go for the life he has led--for from the pages of A Darkening Green it appears...
...themselves. Many of the conversations are really just strings of quotations, supplemented only by some remarkably vivid photographs by Jill Krementz. This approach usually proves successful, thanks to the caliber of the interviewees; unlike Rex Reed, Shenker doesn't have to resort to bitchy observations to spice up vapid quotes. Inevitably, some of the conversations are not all that fascinating, and at least one--a piece on Noam Chomsky as a linguist--is downright boring, an object lesson in how words can get in the way of an explanation. But the book as a whole is remarkably rich; most...
...more vapid excuse for a mass circulation magazine would be difficult to imagine. Americans supposedly have an unmet need for heroes. The astronauts did not pan out; the current president has turned out to be a criminal; Vietnam produced only careerists. People zeroes in on celebrities, not on generals and space cadets. And it tries to manufacture celebrities...
Died. Billy DeWolfe, 67, veteran stage and screen comedian who started out in show biz as a theater usher; of cancer; in Los Angeles. DeWolfe and his drooping mustache appeared in numerous vapid Hollywood comedies (the first: Dixie, in 1943) before hitting the big time with an impersonation of Mrs. Murgatroyd, a matronly tippler, in Blue Skies (1946) and later with a performance as a stuffy diplomat in Call Me Madam (1953). His successes on the stage included his role as J.B. Biggley in the London production and New York revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...