Word: maladroit
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...lured to faraway places by low-priced jet packages, solid steak-and-tater burghers have returned home by the millions with tingling memories of the rites and delights of other nations' tables. Julia Child's 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her superbly low-key, artfully maladroit TV demonstrations were immensely influential in persuading her fellow citizens that serious cuisine is not some kind of Gallic voodoo but rather the art of the eminently possible...
...ungainly and at times vulgar contortions. Yet throughout his eye for "arabesque" (a term borrowed from dance, meaning "overall pattern of line") prevails, and his statuettes withstand his often perverse challenges. It is as if Degas wanted to tease his audience by effecting the spontaneously off-kilter or maladroit, merely to vindicate an operating principle that he summed up once by saying, "Nothing in art must seem to be an accident, not even movement...
...respect for Hitchcock's stature, and his years, Family Plot should be considered as fleetingly as possible. It is a comedy thriller gone awry, vulgar, lifeless and maladroit. The script is by Ernest Lehman, who wrote the witty screenplay for Hitchcock's sumptuous self-parody, North by Northwest. Here the writing is less like satire than putdown. At one point, Bruce Dern, who plays a scuffling actor/cab driver named Lumley, grouses to his girl friend, a self-proclaimed medium: "You've really got me by the crystal balls...
...imaginary European kingdom called Whalebone. A resourceful scavenger of story ideas, Charyn says the inspiration for the Isaac trilogy came from night mares of his brother, a homicide detective in the New York police department. Whalebone was provoked by a reading of Emperor Maximilian's brief maladroit reign in mid-19th century Mexico...
...Waterston is the most maladroit Hamlet to appear on a professional stage in the past decade. He bears not the remotest resemblance to a prince. He is like a little boy throwing a nightlong temper tantrum. His twitchy gestures suggest those of a puppet on the strings of a drunken puppeteer. His voice is woefully devoid of resonance. He delivers the Shakespearean line like a squawk box in dire need of a lozenge. Add to this little humor and less thought, and Hamlet the Dane becomes Hamlet the Cipher...