A
cloddish story, badly told, goes nowhere with the speed of a slug on tranquillisers.
"Clay is lumpish and
cloddish yet if you coax it a little it will turn into a beauty and even smile and laugh."
In the university library is a photo from 1947, of George VI and his family arriving at the Great Pitso held in their honor - in a Daimler, over the
cloddish veld, flanked by the Mounted Police with flags at the end of their lances, the pale faces of the princesses glued to the window.
Slogging through this gritty minutiae is all right for
cloddish reporters like Keeler and McGinniss - and the judge, attorneys and jurors in the trial that found MacDonald guilty - but not for a woman of letters like Malcolm, adept at intuiting the inner life of her subjects.
My favorite: "The transition from Nixon's administration to Ford's was a thing of awe and dignity.' My next-favorite is his defense of Ford's
cloddish record in the House: "While Ford voted wrong most of the time, at least he was decently wrong.'
Bobby (Lawrence) is a henpecked plumber working on a serf-help book, Doug (Allen) a dentist dissed as lame by his own pubescent son, and computer programmer Dudley (Macy) is a
cloddish bachelor too shy to approach women.
A lot of the humour in Agnes is that
cloddish and flat-footed - but things do settle down a little as the story unfolds.
Yusaku was never quite able to respond to Yukiko's intensity, and she ended up marrying the agreeable but
cloddish, younger Kenichiro (Takayuki Sorita), who also looked up to the older, seemingly more mature Yusaku.
THE SQUARE PEG (BBC2, 8.35am - 9.10am) Norman Wisdom in predictable,
cloddish comedy.
But here, at the end of a film that gets stronger--more menacing--as it goes on, instead of the thing itself there is, by Geffen Records' own, a horrible imitation: generic,
cloddish, ham-fisted and, in Axl Rose's singing, hysterical, as if the end, the end of the vogue for his band, is all too plain.
As executed, however, it comes off as forced wackiness, at once
cloddish and faux-sophisticated.
Back at court, Andrew Weems triumphs as Cloten, the
cloddish son of Imogen's stepmother.
Jones also portrays a
cloddish police homophobe and the white supremacist who tries to recruit him, but these textbook cretins feel too overdetermined to be real -- as if Jones had dutifully scratched out a foil to her sympathetic rebels the better to establish their anger and authenticity.
More problematic is that pic barely registers a scare, due to helmer Chuck Russell's
cloddish direction and sense of action.
