Word: dourness
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...than a rubber stamp. That could make perestroika all the more endearing to Americans, who have a special affinity for revolutions that involve tax revolts. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 65% of Americans said they thought superpower relations were "entering a new era." On American television the dour babushka in the old Wendy's hamburger ads has given way to the svelte Soviet customs agent who shares a Seagram's wine cooler with an American tourist...
Todd's life is a walk through the 20th century, and Boyd makes a lavish, if somewhat raveled, tour leader. Todd's mother, like Rousseau's, dies giving birth to him, and he grows up with his dour physician father and his pompous elder brother, not knowing much of love except for the erratic attentions of Oonagh, the daily. An indifferent student, he is eventually shipped off to a boarding school that he actually enjoys, in part because he never takes rugby seriously and in part because he is able to develop his talent for photography...
...those of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two fellow British double agents whom he helped escape in 1951, inspired countless plays, films, novels and biographies. In spy fiction if not reality, Philby's perfidy seems to have been pivotal in a mood swing from patriotic derring-do to dour pessimism...
...time of dread," reads a legend at the start of George Lucas' new epic. Surely it was. We speak not only of the dour Middle Ages in which this sword-and-sorcery film is set but of the late 1980s, when Lucasfilm hit its dark age, after nearly a decade as the most profitable dream-mongering empire in movie history. By 1984 Lucas had produced five of the eight all-time top grossers. But that was a long time ago, in a land far, far away. Lucas' fantasies went murky (Labyrinth) or smirky (Howard the Duck), and his empire suddenly...
...best description of Bellman and True is an oxymoron: it is, of all things, a dour caper. That is, a usually merry cinematic enterprise -- the one in which a group of swagmen laugh all the way to the supposedly impenetrable bank vault from which they intend to extract millions -- is shown with brutal realism...