Word: bitterness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most significant innovation comes in Rose's Turn, an outpouring of Rose's bitter longing for the spotlight. Where Daly played the scene in a fury, Midler gradually enters into the fantasy and smiles, flaunts her bosom, coyly sells herself to an imaginary audience. At the end, she and her daughter reach a reconciliation more convincing and complete than in most interpretations...
Throughout the film Leigh's vision of London is stark. His tendency to hold the camera completely still lends the narrative an almost documentary quality--Leigh rests on Cyril's mum's lined and bitter face or on a view of her gloomy kitchen. Pauses like these counterbalance the near-hysteria of Leigh's social caricatures. And the breathing space they provide force one to contemplate how close to reality those caricatures are. Because you can take it from me that British society does still revolve around antiquated, almost tribal social rituals. And Mike Leigh does dissect them with...
...unsatisfied Prince to life. Sompong has some genuinely funny moments, as when he mournfully sings "Prayer for a Duck" with a look somewhere between grief and self-disgust. He also does an excellent job of avoiding the trap of lapsing into sentimental cheesiness. Instead, his Pippin is slightly more bitter, cynical and world-weary...
...might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build...
...some 4,250,000 from 1820 to 1920. Native-born Americans sniffed at these Gaels -- made desperate by the potato famine that devastated their homeland in the 1840s -- as filthy, bad-tempered and given to drink. The haunting, taunting employment sign NO IRISH NEED APPLY became a bitter American cliche. And yet Irish lasses made the clothmaking factories of New England hum. Irish lads built the Erie Canal, paved the highways and laid tracks for the railroads. In the South the Irish were sometimes considered more expendable than slaves and were hired, at pitifully low wages, for the dirtiest...