Sentences with phrase «almost dumb character»

Not exact matches

And he has done so on occasion with such a keen, almost cruel eye for the pettiness, pretension and self - delusion that accompanies these processes that he mines acute, broad - based truths from relatively rarefied milieus; Baumbach's characters are overwhelmingly white, college - educated East Coast - ers, smart enough to know that their privilege gives them little right to the angst they feel, but dumb enough to feel it anyway.

Almost all of the characters are dumber than they should be, examples; a doctor ends up committing one of horrors most offending rules, a young cop who is completely unconvincing, and one of the sisters that wants to make an escape but never tries very hard to do so.

Because - and especially in their assessments - they tend to reflect familiar categories: The sharp and often distorting distinctions among and between «subjects»; age grading; the value placed on quick recall; the dumbing down of the quality and grace of expository prose to make it fit into some sort of rating scheme; the overload of material to be covered, usually the inevitable result of intracommittee ideological logrolling, which leads to a bit of this and a dollop of that; the almost absolute denial of a value placed on individual ingenuity, craggy but provocative thinking, sustained work, and desirable variety; the lack of interest, signaled by the assessment apparatus, of the virtues of fairness, good character, and imagination.