Word: pompousness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ulrik Brendel, an old mentor of Rosmer's whose life has corroded through his own illusory ambitions, was given a Chaplinesque twist by Joel Henning. As Professor Kroll, the pompous but observant conservative, Richard B. Stone heroically varies his redundant lines. Had he used his torso as flexibly, the visual effect would have been similarly less monotonous. Joel Crothers as the opportunistic radical leader whose dreams never exceed his political capabilities, and Beryl Kinross-Wright as a housekeeper, turn in two excellent performances...
...some of Wilson's longer poems, one seems to be reading the pompous Latin hexameters of a precocious college class poet, translated by himself much later into would-be lively English. Thus the verse manages to suffer simultaneously from "if youth but knew" and "if age but could." Other poems become wearying concatenations of assonances and alliterations in esoteric meters. At best, Wilson achieves a kind of chirky colloquialism. A characteristic sample...
...junta is doggedly unsentimental. Engagement rings and dowries are out. Funeral services may no longer be pompous, lengthy and expensive as in the past, but should be brisk, cheap and austere; among other things, the custom of bowing three times before the funeral altar will be streamlined down to a single bow. Newly forbidden is the use of wooden, disposable chopsticks in Korea's 11,676 restaurants and teahouses-the government wants to conserve the country's dwindling timber reserves; instead, the use and reuse of plastic chopsticks is urged...
...second and solidest act of the play is commandeered by Walter Matthau in a brilliant portrayal of a patrician whose blood has been blue for so long that it has curdled. Haughty, unutterably bored, pompous, his face and his talk seem ravaged by Bourbonic plague-a snob's snob who becomes human under stress...
...whether-and how-it should use that medium for society's good as well as its own. If admen are often fair game for critics, it may well be because they have too often pictured themselves as society's savior instead of its servant. "Some admen get pompous," snaps Foote Cone's Fax Cone, "and they come out with statements such as, 'Our lives are better because of advertising.' This is not true. Our lives are better with advertising, but not because...