Word: blende
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Gradually, in a rambling way. Pagnol builds up a fine store of memory, characterized by the special blend of feeling -love of life combined with a shrugging irony about its limitations-that marks the best of his films and plays. Some of Author Pagnol's anecdotes are a little too pat, recalling some of the slapstick in his lighter movies. And at the end, when he looks back on the deaths of some of those he loved, he allows himself a platitude, a kind of sentimental existentialism: "Such is the life of man. A few joys, quickly obliterated...
Brilliance & Temperament. In Jânio Quadros, Brazil got a curious blend of introvert and extravert, a man of wide learning whose political thought borrows from Lincoln and Jefferson, who is a hardworking, conservative-minded public servant in office, yet who campaigns with a ward politician's gallus-snapping appeal for the mass vote, promising all things to all men. He is a man whose life has been studded with flaring spurts of brilliance and temperament. The son of an upcountry gynecologist with roving ways who was finally shot dead at 68 by the irate husband...
What is most rewarding and least nine-teenish about A Taste of Honey is its un-histrionic realism, which blinks at nothing but can be wry as well as harsh, can use sunlight to make soot the more visible, and can blend a knack for theater with a sense of truth. With its misfits and misfortunes, all too much of the play could have turned sentimental; only here and there is it a little so. Even more, it could have turned sensational, but bold black words like Illegitimacy and Homosexuality and Miscegenation boil down into what is in the world...
...Allen (Hippolyta) cannot shape a long speech so as to maintain any interest at all; three of the four young Athenians are incompetently portrayed, with only Mariette Hartley, as Helena, rising above mediocrity. Titania, Oberon, and most of their minions were neither human nor supernatural, and failed completely to blend the two in the way that the play requires. Some child-fairies, costumed in what appeared to be their pajamas, were revolting...
Isolationism is a word not heard much any more in the U.S. What has replaced it, after the first enthusiasm of one-worldism, is a blend of internationalism and nationalism, a viewpoint that accepts the permanent entanglements with other nations as necessary and even desirable, but insists on upholding the sovereignty and interests of the U.S. In his performance at the U.N., Cabot Lodge filled that bill well. While unmistakably dedicated to the U.N. idea, he never left any doubt that he was there as the spokesman for the U.S. and the guardian of its interests...