Word: dumbness
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...does not have to cover much territory (in time or space) or involve many characters to bring its goods home. It tells the simple story of a moody redneck named Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who works on an oil-rig by day and sleeps with Ray (Karen Black), a dumb-blonde diner waitress, by night...
...only benefit of the crime, which he now calls "dumb," was that Kemp got a pretrial mental exam at Bellevue Hospital, where he became good friends with Novelist Norman Mailer, who was in for stabbing his wife (she later refused to press charges). Given a sentence of ten to twelve years, Kemp began smuggling short-story manuscripts out of prison for Mailer's comments and corrections. He trained himself partly by rewriting passages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in his own words. He also learned French and earned a high school equivalency certificate. "Somewhere around...
...known paintings, which depicts a deer skull with vast antlers hovering above a range of hills, is From the Faraway Nearby; it reflects her gift for telescopic and microscopic sight. On one hand, her work is obsessed with landscapes-as-epic, landscape as an active protagonist, exerting the immense dumb power of its presence on human intruders. "Those hills!" she exclaims, in front of a canvas of 1944, Black Place III. "They go on and on-it was like looking at two miles of gray elephants." In fact, her love of epic scale (although her paintings are startlingly small) provides...
...nice things about covering sports at Harvard is that most of the jocks here don't fit the dumb jock image. This means that you can get intelligent thoughts out of them and write interesting features on them. Thin of that...
...example: A scene in a diner. Nicholson has had the classic crisis with the dumb waitress. She accepts no menu substitutions, cannot understand even his compromises. The moment arrives when our blood and Nicholson's are boiling with the same vengeful fury. Instead of responding to the situation (and response is what it's all about), Nicholson destroys it. Rather than commenting on the violent hate which such a situation calls up in us, rather than suggesting ways out these petty confrontations which add up to the trivial but crippling despairs of our existence, Five Easy Pieces plays a puerile...