Word: cipheritis
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...villainous to the point of cliché. (They have hairy hands and thin lips and slight accents - those bastards!) Even the possible-rape victim is shrill and self-serving and, well, cynical and joyless. As a result the book hangs on Kyle, and Kyle remains something of a cipher. He's got a kindly divorced father who lives in a small town in Pennsylvania and hunts deer, so we know we're supposed to like him. But mostly he just flip-flops between being angry and being very, very tired. (See the 100 best novels of all time...
...past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush's economic team, but we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that at a moment when there was a vast national need for reassurance, the President himself was a cipher. Yes, he's a lame duck with an Antarctic approval rating - but can you imagine Bill Clinton going so gently into the night? There are substantive gestures available to a President that do not involve the use of force or photo ops. For example, Bush could have boosted the public...
That's tough work, since Craig, appealingly sturdy in Casino, is near mute here: a cyber- or cipher-Bond with a loyalty chip implanted in a mechanism that's built for murderous ingenuity. "If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him, "it would be deeply appreciated." As played by Dench with a nice mix of the brusque and the maternal, M must be more than Bond's superior; she is his enabler, protector and shrink. Yet Craig's Bond isn't given to soul-searching. He's a brute acting on instinct: Rambo of Her Majesty...
...From the first moment of Casino Royale, Craig was a different sort of Bond. Instead of the 007 of the Fleming canon - a tough but smooth gentleman spy, schooled at Eton and Cambridge, radiating wit and warm sensuality - Craig seems a cyber- or cipher-Bond, with a loyalty chip implanted in a mechanism that's built for murderous ingenuity. ("If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him in this installment, "it would be deeply appreciated.") In lieu of the double-entendre bons mots assigned to Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan, Craig communicates in grunts and sullen...
...only symbolic, glob?al import. He has very little real power in Iran, none over foreign policy or the nuclear program. He has no more power than his predecessor, the failed reformer Mohammed Khatami, who came to be regarded in the West and in Iran as a well-dressed cipher. Indeed, Ahmadinejad has failed in the one area where he actually does have some authority: reforming the sluggish oligopoly that is the Iranian domestic economy. There have been riots over the rising price of gasoline. His political future is shaky. And yet this strange little man who brings to mind...