Word: mawkishly
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...offstage like cameos. Here is a good-natured Allen Ginsberg, a self-absorbed Anais Nin, a pathologically untruthful Truman Capote, an endearing Tennessee Williams (who, during lunch with Senator John Kennedy in Palm Beach, Florida, tells Vidal that their host has a great butt), and a rather mawkish Jack Kerouac, with whom Vidal has a brief affair. (No man is a hero to his Vidal--and every man, the author insinuates, harbors homoeroticism within...
...killing of any innocent character is invariably portrayed in such a maudlin, mawkish way that there can be no mistake about the moral status of the act. If TV shaped our behavior, then America would likely be a continent of self-righteous citizens out to exact justice in a morally simplistic world of good guys and bad guys--violent, perhaps, but not random...
...turns mawkish and affecting, the film might be called Rocky, 8. The boxing match is a chess match, the plucky challenger is 3 1/2 ft. tall, and his ultimate opponent is an Apollo Creed kid with killer moves and no-soul eyes. Zaillian, whose early screenplays (The Falcon and the Snowman, Awakenings) turned real-life psychodrama into italicized melodrama, underlines the emotions here too, as if the subject weren't strong enough to hold the interest of a Nintendo child or a Home Alone parent...
...takes work, in part, because the politicians will constantly disappoint. Believing in a Place Called Hope means something different from what Bill Clinton intended in that brilliantly mawkish convention speech line. Hope is required precisely because Clinton himself is so flawed. Otherwise, we could simply swoon, and hope would be superfluous. But Clinton is a dissembler, like all (successful) politicians. He is a reckless maker of incompatible promises that destine every subgroup of his supporters to feel betrayed about something. He is wrong about some issues, cowardly about others, right on fewer than any individual supporter might wish...
...pain as an arm in a sling gets wrenched anew) and Jack Wallace as a veteran cop full of salty scorn for anything he cannot understand. The opening act is a fast 90 minutes of wit and surprise; the shorter second act eventually winds down into wearying explication and mawkish reconciliation, yet a saving vitality lingers...