Word: ventriloquists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Maniototo is not necessarily plain in New Zealand's centeral Otago; the region may exist only in the wonderfully deranged mind of novel's narrator, herself a chimera of identities. She is, at various stages, Violet Pansy Proudlock, a ventriloquist: Mavis Barwell, widow of a French teacher turned debt collector; and Alice Thumb, a novelist...
...novel a solid grounding. His Memorex ear for dialogue and his unblinking self-examination provide the basis for a muted, moral judgment on life as it was lived along the San Andreas Fault in the good old days of Watergate. If Paul's relationship with Emily, the ventriloquist lady, remains a trifle too enigmatic, that does not fatally flaw a novel of wit, sensibility, and a delicate honesty about the ways (notably sexual) in which distant stations send and receive signals across the modern wasteland...
Certainly Magic is endless, especially if one has seen Dead of Night, Psycho or any of the other horror movies it ineptly rips off The film tells the story of a psychotic ventriloquist (Anthony Hopkins) whose dummy "orders" him to kill. For two hours the audience must unwillingly suspend disbelief while the other characters take their sweet time in unmasking the villain. There is no pretty scenery or hot sex to relieve the intervening tedium...
...with the ponderous pace of Richard Attenborough's direction, the same touch that made his A Bridge Too Far an hour too long. Nor is there much life in William Goldman's script, which uncomfortably straddles the genres of mystery and psycho-drama. The familiar theme of the mad ventriloquist and his not-so-dumb dummy can still invoke shudders, but the filmakers' failure to find a fresh approach makes the whole thing tedious...
Witty and energetic, he has great appeal among the young; he keeps a ventriloquist's dummy in his baronial office to entertain visiting schoolchildren. Kucinich has a large collection of comic books and has seen Star Wars six times. He is a master at manipulating the media. On the night that he edged out the official Democratic candidate for mayor by only 2,900 votes of the 180,000 cast, Kucinich was in the newsroom of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he once worked as a copy boy. While photographers clicked their cameras, he sent the edited story...