Word: curmudgeonly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...evening’s potatoes-and-pie promised land had just buckled under the triple knockout blows of a flat tire, a Weather Channel-defying drizzle, and a carnivorous version of Microsoft Office (one that apparently thrives on devouring junior papers-in-progress without a trace). No curmudgeon by nature, I couldn’t help but note that the “unexpected” seemed to get its kicks in somewhat perverse ways. In the end, however, holiday cheer prevailed, prompting a reluctant revaluation: Surely there must be some recent, unanticipated events that merit thanks...
...comes from Boris' splenetic vigor: his misery is good company. He's an artist of invective--and in this year's movie gallery of mean old men, a chattier cousin of the widower in Pixar's Up. Credit Boris' vitality to David, resident curmudgeon on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Boris isn't far from roles Allen has written for himself, yet sentiments that sound whiny when Allen articulates them have a robust manliness in David's voice. Rancor is the medicine that keeps Boris alive. It makes him the ideal foil for Melody's cheerful resilience (which Wood winningly...
...laugh. The Supreme Leader, in the midst of announcing a crackdown on the Green Revolution demonstrators, was sounding like the lead character in the most famous contemporary Iranian novel, My Uncle Napoleon, a huge hit as a television series in the 1970s. Uncle Napoleon is a beloved paranoid curmudgeon, the Iranian Archie Bunker. He blames everything - the weather, the economy, the moral vagaries of his family - on the British. This has been a constant theme in Iranian public life for at least 100 years, although the U.S. has supplanted Britain as the Great Satan, the source of all Iranian miseries...
...meet Cal McAffrey (Crowe), star reporter and resident curmudgeon of the Washington Globe, as he's pursuing what seems to be the all-too-routine murder of a drug dealer. Another Globe staffer, perky bloggista Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), is digging for sexual dirt attending the relationship of a Capitol Hill researcher, dead in a train accident, to her boss, Congressman Stephen Collins (Affleck). Cal muscles in on Della's story because in college he was close to the budding politician - and even closer to Stephen's wife, Anne (Robin Wright Penn). As Cal and Della form an uneasy alliance...
...It’s no coincidence that Chan and Fey both work in video. Culture curmudgeon Theodor Adorno wrote that the consequences of television “will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open.” Yup, that sounds about right, except it’s Chan and Fey’s triumph, not the industry’s. And industry is still trying to figure out what happened...