Word: veneering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...company of a virile male. Eugene, an Irish bill collector, fills the bill, and she collects him in an obliquely Pinteresque seduction scene. She clothes and feeds him and teaches him manners rather after the fashion of a reverse Pygmalion. Above all, she teaches him that, in England, veneer is worth far more than character if one is to be a proper social arriviste...
...Guru Maharaj Ji has learned to specialize in just this sort of improbability and overstatement: the shameless graft of a veneer of Eastern spiritualism on to Western pop culture. The band, which will release its first album "Who Is Guru Maharaj Ji?" next month, does songs with refrains like "Take me home with you, Guru Maharaj Ji." The Guru's Indian Mahatmas, equivalent to disciples, stud their sermons with words like "far out" and "A.O.K." At the concert Wednesday, the Guru's most prestigious American convert, former radical leader Rennie Davis, put forth a message which he called "almost unthinkable...
Underneath its veneer of Oriental politesse and indirection, Tanaka's message was remarkably similar. "Not even the United States, with all its might, can unilaterally solve the problems that beset the world today," the Japanese Prime Minister said in a speech to the National Press Club. "Nor should we expect it to do so. These challenges can be met only through global cooperation, and especially through the close collaboration of Japan, the U.S. and Europe." Washington's decision to cut back on exports of soybeans, one of Japan's principal sources of protein, coupled with various other...
...unholy drives that leave them prey to Coburn's mercy, the crumbling self-images which they are struggling to maintain through his promised largesse, is never explored. The events on the yacht pass through their minds without triggering a trace of self-realization. Their lives are framed as veneer on a tricky plot. Unable to scare up interest in its pursuit of a killer, and without the commitment to analyze its characters, Sheila goes down flashily, like a luxury liner, overloaded with champagne...
...social order. The movie appeases the national trauma about women with a sophisticated sleight-of-hand. Not only does it couch its message in 19th century terms, but it refuses even to define Nora in relation to them. It thus disguises the problem and allays it by spreading a veneer of euphoria over it. The ending of the movie is an affirmation of individual female liberation that denies collective liberation. It overlooks the fact that the fight for human equality in the face of a sexist system threatens the substructure of that system. Denying this insight, the movie denies...