Word: veneered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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OHIRA and his squabbling LDP cronies have proved themselves incapable of that leadership. Their obsession with power plays and personal revenge, while hardly unusual for professional politicians, has torn their party apart. The LDP's Grand Guignol shocked a Japanese public accustomed to a veneer of unity and discretion...
...real dimensions of the psychological theme loom before him. Rummaging through the props closet of King of Hearts and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tavernier merely dusts off a confusing collection of cliches. Most of the film has an aura of impenetrable mystery overlaid with a veneer of hastily added political significance. The whole production reeks of a talented artist lost in the complexities of a difficult subject. As the film progresses. The subterfuges that Tavernier resorts to become embarrasingly obvious...
...couldn't help but think that Epps looked like a worried camp counselor underneath his cool veneer. For two hours, he was to be in charge of these Big Guns, a select group of men and women Harvard asks to go out and beat some equally select bushes for the University's upcoming capital fund drive...
...twosome slithers, separately, into the bedroom of Malcolm and Kate, and on encountering a rickety desk that Malcolm has spent all night assembling, Trevor, with one helping touch, reduces it to a pile of kindling. Ayckbourn is an alchemist of incipient disaster, and his absurdist humor cuts through the veneer of domestic tranquillity with a serrated edge. Yet his surgery is oddly healing, a kind of revelation through copious laughter and minimal malice...
...guns, you got guns, all God's chillun got guns."), and the famous mirror sequence. Serious critics have tried to treat the film as a sophisticated surrealistic masterpiece; that kind of analysis, while plausible, just misses the point. Duck Soup works because it whisks away the hypocritical veneer of rationality which policymakers too often use to conceal the real meaning of their actions; like all comic materpieces, it reveals truths the existence of which we find discomforting...