The movie seems to be less about liberation than about futility.

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I'm uncertain about the gender reassignments, but there is no doubt that the updating does its job, elegantly transforming this play about wealth and artistic patronage, about the futility of buying friendship, about pandering to the prosperous, into a paradigm of what Karl Marx saw in his 1844 philosophical treatise as the polluting power of money.

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In Beckett's play Gogo and Didi speak about the futility of life while waiting for the elusive Mr Godot.

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They start to compete with each other, become critical of each other's efforts, and become reflective about the futility of it all.

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The statistician Stephen Stigler once wrote an elegant essay about the futility of the practice of eponymy in science that is, the practice of naming a scientific discovery after its inventor.

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This may provide some comfort to parents who have recently sent in deposits and are worrying about the futility of a liberal arts education versus more practical degrees in engineering, computer science or say, nursing.

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In that case the practice of letting a jury decide whether a warning is complete is an exercise in futility, an argument about a hypothetical.

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What has always fascinated me about World War I was the fundamental change that this titanic futility worked in the way English-speaking people thought.

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Obama and her advisers have been pressuring the restaurant industry to adopt labeling with information about nutrition and calories, although research at New York University argues its futility.

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However, I do very much agree with Ms. Rosenthal about the existence of high crime rates in countries she mentioned, and also with Ms. Peters regarding the futility of good guys attempting to stop violence with guns (or with anything else) in societies where institutions have broken down.

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