Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NICARAGUA. Smoke and the stench of death hung over the isolated Nicaraguan village of Bismuna last week. Bullet holes pocked the wooden sides of the tiny thatched huts that cluster on stilts along the bank of a small river, 20 miles from the Honduran border. A concrete schoolhouse stood blackened and gutted by mortar fire. Brown-shirted members of Bismuna's Sandinista militia defense force gathered up unexploded mortar rounds and other debris of battle. Jorge Vargas Lopez, 38, a combat veteran who fought in Nicaragua's Marxist-led Sandinista revolution of 1979, pointed to boot tracks near...
...hospitals and a post office. During normal times, living conditions for the several thousand refugees are grim yet not unbearable. Sustained by their dream of a Palestinian homeland the men, women and children make do without "luxuries" like running water, electricity and modern sanitation. They can ignore the wooden shacks and mud floors. And they can forget their status as a wandering people whose houses are not really homes...
...cold ugliness of the environment is set off against the powerful, raw life-forces of the high school kids, who find their outlet in American rock and roll songs. Gothar tries, however, to make this brutal contrast bolster up wooden acting, unimaginative cinematography, incomprehensible scenes and insignificant symbols, not too mention cliched, anemic dialogue...
...said of Wouk. His plot is sometimes cumbersome and contrived. The wedding of Natalie's Polish relatives, for ex ample, looks as if it had been borrowed from Fiddler on the Roof, and the timing, the night before the German invasion, is ludicrous. His dialogue is often wooden. "Why did you insist on marrying me?" Natalie asks Byron. "We could have made love as much as you wanted. But now you've tied me to you on this rope of burning nerves." Furthermore, in all the hours of script there is scarcely a glint of humor...
...peppered with paprika. While the $6 to $9 bill for a full meal may be more than at a Burger King in Paris, the price beats the $75 average at Maxim's. Diners can have orders bundled for carry-out or they can sit on stools at small wooden tables overlooked by wall murals depicting nude sculptures...