Word: compendium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Karel Kaplan. A former Communist ideologue in Czechoslovakia who blossomed as a party liberal during the short-lived "Prague spring" of 1968, Kaplan has assembled in West Germany what he says is a vast compendium of documents relating to the turbulent history of Czechoslovakia in the past three decades...
BEING A LIFE-LONG Angeleno, I approached my first screening of Welcome with a pronounced ambivalence, half-expecting a compendium of cheap shots at the city to be woven into the plot. Films set in Los Angeles often spew out the same old Nathaniel West themes, only in a vulgarized way: the plasticity of Southern California, the impermanence of everything from buildings to relationships, etc. But the PR hype about Welcome to L.A. proved true in at least this one sense: Rudolph has carefully omitted all the stale cliches about the place and coined a couple of possible new ones...
...caricatures," described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions...
...great-great-great-great-great-grandfather from a happy childhood in an African village to a flogging in the slave quarters of a Virginia plantation, offer almost no new insights, factual or emotional, about the most terrible days of the black experience. Instead, there is a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions by which, since abolitionist days, popularizers have tried to comprehend a crime so monstrous that, like the Holocaust, it is beyond anyone's ability to re-create in intelligent dramatic terms...
...theater, Williams's compendium of Dylan Thomas tends to be overly static, with little movement, either physical or dramatic. Sound and lighting instead become all-important--sound lulling us into acceptance of the comic and celebratory world of the sketches and stories, lighting marking changes of mood within this world and signalling breaks between tales...