Word: heroic
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There is something heroic nowadays about a movie that dares its audience to keep a straight face. And there are rewards for passing this strenuous test. Quest's canvas is colorfully daubed with great woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, and humanized with a prototype love affair between Naoh (Everett McGill), the chief Ulam, and Ika (Rae Dawn Chong, the daughter of Cheech's partner), a chatty, chalk-dipped girl from a more advanced tribe. McGill brings so much conviction to Naoh's desperate attempts first to keep the old fire alive, and then to create...
...village naif (Jack Gilford). For sage advice the victim consults the local, and unfunny, rabbi: "Why is the sea salty?" "Because of the herrings who live in it.'' In The Bandit, Gilford plays Aleichem himself, terrified by a thief, then retelling his role, à la Falstaff, as heroic. In The High School, the longest and most didactic episode, Gilford plays a domineering and ignorant father whose son is anxious to leave the ghetto for the new century. Between these sketches, Adapter Arnold Perl has shoehorned Bontche Schweig, by I.L. Peretz, a man without Aleichem's name...
What 18-year-old would ever recover? Not Sheed; not quite, though he makes a heroic effort to reach back through the charm to the exemplary life. Clare Boothe Luce's legend, he reports, "could be studied like a Grecian urn, with her forever reaching or being reached for, depending on one's angle of vision." As for her admirers, "They were happy to celebrate her conversion, or her achievements as a Woman, or her spunky duels with F.D.R. in perpetuity. If she had gone out of existence like St. Christopher, they'd have kept...
...What this community means by "democracy" is the freedom of the individual to choose his or her private beliefs and to participate in choosing laws according to which men are equal. As I look at how American assistance abroad has sought to realize this common aspiration of man -- its heroic accomplishment in the two world wars, the Marshall Plan, the many policies (such as food aid) towards developing countries since -- I see both the power and the generosity of America...
...didn't cut off the crusts" (he had forgotten to trim the connubial toast), Alvarez thought: "It's the wrong script." Frantically, he turned page after page. Didn't Lawrence write that Grand Passion was part of the Great Tradition? Wasn't marriage a heroic endeavor? When, four years later, his marriage foundered, the writer felt that he had failed not only as a husband but as a literary critic...