Word: truisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Dying is easy, comedy is hard," Swann intones at one point, claiming this switch on an ancient show-biz truism is an expiring actor's last words, but My Favorite Year's writers and director are sometimes too determined to make it seem as comfortable as possible. The script occasionally ladles warm chicken soup over situations where a spritz in the face would be more appropriate. There are times when Actor Richard Benjamin, making his debut as a feature-film director, is too content with a scene's obvious values to find a handle to twist...
...heart of one swain (Tony Roberts)-are meant to recall Shakespeare's Dream. Ingmar Bergman painted a lovely gloss on the subject in Smiles of a Summer Night. So why can't Allen have more fun with it? No film labeled a sex comedy should offer the truism "Marriage is the death of hope" four times, to be written on the blackboard of the moviegoer's mind. No Woody Allen comedy should mosey for arid stretches without a well-turned gag. And no director should insist that actresses like Farrow and Steenburgen affect the wild ringlets...
WHITE CONCLUDES his final book on presidential politicking by observing the truism that "the quality of American political reporting has improved almost unbelievably over the past 25 years." What he doesn't say is that his own efforts over the last two decades--trekking through the snows of New Hampshire when it was unfashionable to do so, and the like--largely transformed presidential election reporting into the art that it now is acknowledged...
...state tourists, who might have found in the festival an excuse for a vacation in February or March, simply yawned from afar. After 21 premieres, more than 200 performances and the possible loss of $700,000, the festival had to acknowledge the force of an old Hollywood truism: "If the people don't want to come, you can't stop them.'' -By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Marilyn AIva/Miami
...quiet here? No truism is repeated more often than the assertion "somehow we'll muddle through, "a proposition shored up with this bit of evidence: "We always have. "True enough, in the sense that the world is still here. (It is somewhat easier to muddle through in a Mercedes with a rear-window defogger.) But we are not so privileged--we are the generation that cannot muddle through. Which is as good a way to talk about nuclear weapons as there may be. Before, there was room for complacency: if you didn't change something, it didn't mean that...