Word: dourness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that introduces Vesper. Camille too seeks revenge, and admits to Bond with wry satisfaction that she slept with the film’s villain, Dominic Greene (a wonderful Mathieu Amalric), to get closer to the Bolivian general who killed her family. Lest the two spies seem like a dour pair, Haggis and Forster let them off the leash every now and then. Despite Vesper’s painfully felt absence, Bond still lets himself seduce fellow agent Strawberry Fields (no joke), while a tipsy Camille takes pleasure in haranguing Greene in front of several wealthy donors at a party...
...teleconference last week among more than 100 gay legal scholars and others who support gay marriage, the mood was dour. "This has cast a pall" over what had otherwise been a historic election on Nov. 4, said D'Arcy Kemnitz, executive director of the National Lesbian Gay Law Association. Longtime gay rights advocate Dean Trantalis of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and others on the conference call expressed concern that the gay rights movement had become too focused on marriage, and is now paying the price in other more critical areas. "Marriage was never our issue," Trantalis said. "It was thrust upon...
...only minor effects on divorce rates, which have been slowly waning since the early '80s after 20 years of steadily rising. Those trajectories have been influenced more by the rise of the women's movement and women's earning power, lower fertility and changes in divorce laws than by dour Dows. The only recorded spike in divorces in the past 75 years came right after World...
...March 1933, A few days after his Inauguration as President, Franklin Roosevelt left the White House to pay his respects to 92-year-old former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The amiable Roosevelt and the dour Holmes chatted, and after F.D.R. left, Holmes supposedly remarked that the new President had a "second-class intellect but a first-class temperament." Many historians now believe that Holmes was talking about Teddy Roosevelt rather than Franklin, but the story is oft told because it suggests a larger truth: that the most important attribute of a President is not intellect but something...
Happy-Go-Lucky Written and directed by Mike Leigh; rated R; out now Sally Hawkins won the Berlin Film Festival's Best Actress award as a cockeyed-optimist schoolteacher in this larkish entry from the usually dour Brit auteur Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake). Even if you don't find Hawkins as adorable as the movie does, you're likely to fall in love with Karina Fernandez, who plays an imperiously funny flamenco teacher...