Word: gloss
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Presidential debates compel both men to gloss over their miscalculations, exaggerate their strengths, try to lure the other one into error, in order to emerge in the eyes of the public at large as a "winner." All of these objectives so coveted in television performances are the opposite of the qualities so vital to Executive deliberation and diplomatic negotiation...
There are subjects, and this seems to be one, that are almost too romantic to discuss objectively--Bird and Shaffer barely mention the internal splits that divided the IWW into Two Medium-Sized Opposing Camps, and they gloss over the unfulfilled need for an intellectual construct for the union. But what they do focus on is more important. J. Edgar Hoover cut his teeth on the Wobblies; in the face of government's crudest repressions, these immigrant laborers, farm-workers who rode the rails, and confirmed Marxists shone. The film opens with the interrogation of a Wobbly arrested for giving...
...Allen has set his film in a resort hotel and cast himself as a film maker, very much like the Woody Allen we think we know, who finds himself in a creative culdesac. The film mixes memory and fantasy with the surreal-life present. Its visual style is a gloss on 8½'s: seductive black-and-white images, express-train pacing, a foregrounding of comic bit players. The three main women in 8½ (a mistress, a wife, an earthy guardian angel) find their echoes here in Charlotte Rampling, Marie-Christine Barrault and Jessica Harper. Allen also appropriates...
...superficial treatment of the Bobby Baker scandal, the relationship between the Johnsons' business interests and the FCC and the Tonkin Gulf deception lets L.B.J. off the hook. Miller also fails to reflect strongly enough the extent of the damage caused by Johnson's Viet Nam policy. Eulogistic gloss tends to soften some of the harder truths. Perhaps this is the nature of oral biography. At one point the author notes that "memory is a gentleman." True. But when memory serves legend more than history, it becomes a gentleman's gentleman. -By R.Z. Sheppard
...Mitchell to spin out cliffhangers about powerful, tragic families. Who could blame 40 million Americans for taking their pleasures with TV's best and baddest? Come Friday nights this fall, the country will become one huge eavesdropping family, as the denizens of Dallas provide 25 more gilded, high-gloss mirror images of domestic America. For if the show's spectacular success proves anything, it is that when the chemistry is right, oil and soap...