Word: semis
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...MIDWAY into the standard oratory, the image began to change. Nixon made some self-effacing comments: "It's a good thing I'm running for President and not in a beauty contest." This was not Lyndon Johnson; Nixon would not make photographers take his "good" profile. More important, a semi-believable note of humility also began to creep into the bombast of Nixon's "united party--we're going to win" oratory...
...GREAT WHITE HOPE is a sprawling semi-documentary that traces the career of the first Negro heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. The play itself is a drama of contrition stirred by the borrowed adrenaline of newspaper headlines, but James Earl Jones, as the brooding, arrogant boxer, commands the stage like an avenging black giant...
...with Cabaret, Prince's first concern in Zorba is atmosphere. The tone of the show, sustained through the entire evening, is set the moment the curtain rises. The entire cast, only nameless figures at this point, sits in a semi-circle that stretches across the stage. Some are talking; some are joking; some have musical instruments and are singing snatches of Greek songs. This is Greece...
...these gentle frauds are in town this week. The cheaper is Arthur Dreifuss's The Young Runaways, produced by Sam Katzman, a second-rate Albert Zugsmith whose films are usually acted by racing cars. Inadvertantly, Runaways does more toward creating a semi-mythic subculture than Alice B. Toklas, in its strict adherence to the plot premise: everybody in The Young Runaways has runaways on their mind. It is as if Chicago, the film's location, were a vast playground given over to hide-and-seek...
Both films suffer from scriptwriters' inability to go beyond a simple extrapolation of the hippie into already familiar contexts: Alice B. Toklas might just as well be called Nichols and May Meet The Flower Children, its frame of reference entirely consisting of semi-improvised Jewish comedy prevalent in Neil Simon and lesser Feiffer. Runaways is structurally a simplistic morality play juggling black-and-white moral quantities with the vengeance of a true confessions magazine...