Word: dourness
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Dirty Pretty Things can't cure the world's ills and doesn't try. It's a movie, not an international treaty. But its dour comic take on misery, and on the strategies people concoct to outsmart it, improves the world of summer films. And you don't have to leave your brain at the door...
...sense of aloofness has always been a Kerry problem--"You shouldn't hold John's looks against him," former Senator Bob Kerrey once told me--and Dean's chesty informality has only exacerbated Kerry's air of dour Brahmin solemnity. In truth, he isn't so much aloof as he is courtly, in a formal, afternoon-tea sort of way. The shoutathon of modern politics discomforts him. He is a serious, experienced, thoughtful man; his policy speeches have been among the best of any Democrat's. But he is also a cautious man who has surrounded himself with an overstuffed...
...sense of aloofness has always been a Kerry problem-"You shouldn't hold John's looks against him," former Senator Bob Kerrey once told me-and Dean's chesty informality has only exacerbated Kerry's air of dour Brahmin solemnity. In truth, he isn't so much aloof as he is courtly, in a formal, afternoon-tea sort of way. The shoutathon of modern politics discomforts him. He is a serious, experienced, thoughtful man; his policy speeches have been among the best of any Democrat's. But he is also a cautious man who has surrounded himself with an overstuffed...
...Sounds dour, doesn't it? But Sweet Sixteen is not a gloomy picture. It's often slyly amusing. Liam, who manages a pizza shop, cottons on to a more lucrative delivery business: a side order of drugs. He has a friend, Pinball, who is comically, often stupidly, out of control and needs a lot of career guidance. Sometimes it's a touching film, especially in the scenes dealing with Liam's sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton), a single mom bravely struggling to raise her baby decently in an environment full of crime and beset by hopelessness...
...much time courting young people since then, either. (Their fixations on prescription drugs for the elderly and leaving Social Security alone are utter losers with nongraybeards.) If the Democrats want to think romantic as well as big, the obvious area is the environment. Several of the candidates have proposed dour, incremental "energy-independence" schemes that feature many of the worthy, ho-hum notions of years past--conservation, fuel-efficiency standards and the like. But the fun part of the environment is gizmos. The President, a gizmo kind of guy, embraced the hydrogen car. The Democrats could do that and more...