Word: awkward
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...season, if history holds true cash registers at multiplexes across the country will be humming along. All the major studios will be unveiling their year-end ornaments, all aspiring to be placed atop the lucrative box office tree. For the film industry knows that the best antidote to those awkward family moments (especially after the first semester of a young elf’s first year at Harvard) is an escape to the cinema, a place where folks can forget about shopping and little Jimmy’s bad grades and get lost with a neurotic Russell Crowe, or Gandalf...
...Idioteque,” one of the most outstanding tracks from the new albums, is even more edgy and deranged on Wrong, the live drums providing the driving, lop-sided drum machine sample with even greater insistency. Being able to not only reproduce but improve on such an awkward song is impressive in itself. Yorke maintains the frantic energy unaccompanied except for drums for much of the song before surrendering to the chorus of industrial-style whooshes and tinkles that are fast becoming Radiohead’s stock-in-trade. Both “I Might Be Wrong?...
...Prospects for an inclusive national government are bedeviled both by Afghanistan's awkward ethnic makeup, and its position at a geopolitical crossroads. There is no majority ethnic group in Afghanistan. The Pashtun are the largest minority, making up some 38 percent of the population, but like the Tajik (25 percent), Hazara (19 percent) and Uzbek (6 percent) they are part of a group whose majority lives in another country. Most Pashtuns live in Pakistan, Tajiks in Tajikistan, Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, and while the Hazaras are not ethnically linked with Iran, their Shiite brand of Islam gives them a common identity...
Unfortunately, ill-advised screen usage and poor sightlines are not all that plague this production. Awkward staging also sinks a number of scenes, including all those in which guns figured prominently. Every scene that features a character holding a gun and threatening another is unbelievable and loses its dramatic build, both because of the way the actors hold their weapons and the way they react to the situations. And among the more curiously flawed scenes is the second act opener, “Bui Doi,” which occasionally feels like a Sally Struthers commercial and at other times...
...errors compound the problems presented by the faint voices and disorganized dances. The speakers, used principally for sound effects, don’t always work when they should and sometimes work when they shouldn’t. And, on opening night, a late opening of the curtain created an awkward moment...