In "Fat Albert," that trademark is resurrected to depressingly diminished ends.
Banking on the studio adage that there's no success like a previous box office hit, Mr. Phillips and company dutifully recycle the first movie to increasingly diminishing ends that include the baby-now-monkey, the giggly, swishy gangster Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) and the obligatory, obliging anti-wives (i.e., whores).
Instead, the film dissolves into a series of diminishing anticlimaxes, ending on a note of portentous ambiguity.
The revelation that this is not the case slightly diminishes that ending for me, although I am interested in how very easy she finds it to compartmentalise her life.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is planning to travel to Africa and Europe later this month, should add the Middle East to his itinerary to see if he can at least persuade the two sides to diminish or end the bloodshed.
It is likely that any caps would be structured to aim at high-income households, and would diminish or end the mortgage tax break for many of those taxpayers.
They were often small aisless buildings with two or three connected cells, each of diminishing size, ending in a rounded apse.
Behaviors that are not followed by positive consequences but have neutral or adverse responses should diminish and end unwanted behaviors, thus describing the process of operant conditioning.
As time passed, however, the influx of Greek colonists diminished and then ended when the wars of the Hellenistic kings interrupted this movement.
High prices, overproduction and stiff competition, particularly from what Europeans still quaintly refer to as "the New World," have seriously diminished, if not ended, France's role as the leader in wine exports.
