Word: awed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...words of the old spiritual: Everybody's goin' to heaven, just ain't talkin' 'bout it. The silence is such that it sometimes seems heaven might as well not be there. Kreeft complains that even if our basic belief has not wavered, "our sense of beauty, glory, wonder, awe, magnificence, triumph has shrunk" into something "joyless." Marked by an apparent combination of lay ignorance and pastoral skittishness, the minimization of paradise not only creates problems for heaven-hungry believers like Burton; it also suggests the marginalization of one of Western civilization's greatest ideas...
Just as conversation stopped in the 1940s when Luciano entered a room and an austere silence of mixed awe and respect descended, it is a cardinal sin to whisper and interrupt the don during The Godfather. As one of Luciano's buddies would recall in a recent A&E docu-drama, "The clink of a glass, the drop of a hat--you'd hear the littlest sound, everyone was so quiet when Lucky arrived at the club." These were high profile men: men who drank their whisky straight, men who traveled in a cloud of cash and Cuban cigars, leaving...
...soon need to find other means of dietary support: the big guy has shed 50 lbs. and is down to a merely huge 225. He hopes to drop 65 lbs. more. "I want to be Paul Newman's weight," he says in the burly baritone that has struck awe, fear and amusement into the small independent-film community...
...Luke Skywalker (Hamill), the naive twenty-year-old enraptured by Princess Leia's beauty who seeks to avenge the death of his father during the space age totalitarians' overthrow of the republic. Luke is an irresistible figure, the country bumpkin with just the right tough of idealism and starstruck awe to endear him to any audience. He saves the day of course, hitting the heavily protected weak link in the planet-fortress of the Empire that reduces the forces of evil to a pyrotechnic starburst signaling the end of the dark days in the universe, While the dogfight that leads...
...with much conviction. It's an elegant production, the dominant stage image a tree in full blossom, with a broken trunk. The big scenes are somewhat muted (Marjorie Yates' Linda and Mark Strong's Biff are good if unmemorable) but the small ones achingly poignant--like the mix of awe and desolation with which Willy marvels at next-door neighbor Bernard's success: "Your friends have their own private tennis court?" What emerges most clearly in this version is Miller's critique of capitalism: Willy is less a tragic figure brought down by his flaws than the pawn...