Word: dour
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...Chile's dour 70-year-old dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, reacted harshly. Troops and police charged into an illegal May Day demonstration in Santiago, arresting 500 and injuring a dozen with rubber bullets. Security forces conducted sweeps in slum areas of the city, arresting a total of 11,000 men, who were hauled off to soccer fields and marked for police reference with indelible ink. If the unrest continues, Pinochet is likely to resort to a still tougher response: a state of siege of the kind that finally quelled similar unrest...
...interim, however, Rudolph seems to have mislaid his sense of humor, and Trouble in Mind is a walk on the dour side. The locale is "RainCity" (which is not going to please the Chamber of Commerce in Seattle, where the film was shot). A cashiered cop named Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) broods and moralizes as he advances on Wanda (Genevieve Bujold), who runs a shabby cafe and represents experience, and on Georgia (Lori Singer), a waif who represents innocence. Her common-law husband Coop (Keith Carradine) is a hick tough with delusions of gaining grandeur in the urban underworld...
...best salve for a seven-year itch. It could be that, at 50, Allen is looking not to accuse his characters, or even to absolve them, but to lay on a blessing. In his Manhattan everyone has his reasons, and almost everyone deserves a happy ending. Dear, dour Mickey gets blessed best, with a wry miracle of regeneration. The barrenness of despair gives way to a hope for continuation of the species. For most American directors--glad-handers and show- boaters--that resolution might seem tentative at best. But for Woody Allen, who finds grim death gargling all around...
...Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example, can have an almost oppressive sobriety. As playfulness alternates with the more austere, missionary vision, the American cultural personality seems like a preacher's child, frisky and slaphappy on Saturday night, dour and repentant Sunday morning. In the battle for America's aesthetic soul, it is the Shakers vs. the Rockettes...
...that she chooses clothes with a touch of wit, even if she occasionally looks like a fashion casualty. After years of seeing the Queen Mum parading around in hats that look as though a bird of paradise had expired on her head and the Queen looking like a dour librarian, even Diana's Di-sasters, as the tabloids call them, are refreshing...