Word: mawkishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Maybe for Salesman, but Timebends is often muddled, even mawkish. In the final passage, Miller describes eyeing coyotes warily eyeing him on his Connecticut spread and sententiously proclaims, "We are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees." Still, if Miller the autobiographer refuses to offer shapely stories and easy pleasures, but instead insists on the uncomfortable, the unsettling and the contentious, that is what Miller the playwright has done for more than four decades. American literature -- and life -- has been vastly the richer...
...approach was off-center, cool in every sense. In Andy Warhol's first shows, in 1962, he exhibited enormous paintings of Coke bottles and Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. The subject was pop, but determinedly devoid of high-culture anger. Roy Lichtenstein's jumbo cartoon-panel paintings, complete with mawkish dialogue fragments and ersatz Benday dots, were jollier expressions of the same idea...
Every Labor Day the demigod of bad taste, Jerry Lewis, holds his famous telethon for muscular dystrophy. Every year this mawkish tribute to human misery makes money. But though Lewis is cheesy, he is still trying to reach some lowest common denominator of kindness. Without a reputation to enhance (except in France) and lacking the really big talents that would bring Nielsen points by their very presence. Lewis has to rely on a barrage of sympathy-grabbing images to make people even a little concerned. USA for Africa does the exact opposite, attempting to emotionally shield people from the problem...
...example, ABC hurtled graphics maps across the screen to pinpoint where lesser-known countries are situated, but the globes were so minute that it was hard to discern even continents. Some of the prepackaged features, put together in the name of world brotherhood, were embarrassing: John Denver crooned a mawkish ballad at a mass grave for 11,000 victims of the Nazis; and McKay, Frank Gifford and Bob Beattie mugged their way through a mock-boozy time-out in a Yugoslav...
...best interests of the nation." If some expected a bitter, angry valedictory, Nixon was controlled and ultimately conciliatory. Nixon once said that the test of a people is the way it handles the transition of power, and last week-in his resignation speech if not in his mawkish, self-pitying White House goodbye-he deserved credit for helping to bring off the transition with dignity in what must have been the most painful moment of his life...