Word: duller
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Most people feel that state governments are dull, and getting duller. To say this one does not have to agree with those would-be Cassandras who moan that the federal government is preempting all fields of activity and is putting the state governments out of business. The lack of creative planning by state governments is a result not so much of an inferior position in the federal system as of political circumstance...
...Drury; he has begun to write about ordinary people. They are the nice upper-middle-class inhabitants of Greenmont, Calif., a summer colony 6,000 feet up in the Sierras. Greenmont is slightly more exclusive than the U.S. Senate; residential memberships are restricted to 75. It is also much duller. The blurred argle-bargle of private thoughts is so much less interesting than even the most preposterous oratory; Drury's people are so ordinary that they could be sold to a public-opinion poll as an instant sample...
...numerous confrontation scenes between the mad sisters and their employers get duller and duller. Papatakis has great difficulty in creating bourgeois characters without letting them become absolute fools. When the master or the mistress deliver long homilies on respectability, the audience can only laugh. As a result, the pity and blame are not equally balanced between the family and the sisters, and the emotional conflict inherent in the situation is sacrificed to pure sensationalism. Our sympathies do go out to these characters despite the structure of the film, but we must still leave the theatre with the feeling that...
...nonfiction, which was generally more distinguished, it was indisputably the Year of the Kennedys in which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with his A Thousand Days made an art form out of instant history. Not too far behind-and duller because more self-consciously definitive-was Ted Sorensen's Kennedy. But for every excellent Kennedy book, there were at least seven sloppily sentimental ones, and the surfeit went so far that Monocle magazine's Victor Navasky struck home with his satirical suggestion for a brand-new title: "Taxi to Greatness, the story of the cab driver who drove young John...
SQUARE'S PROGRESS, by Wilfred Sheed. When his wife calls him a bore and leaves him, a nice, adjusted insurance salesman sets out to discover the Cool World. He learns that hips are duller than squares...