Word: dourness
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...Laughing wild certainly abounded in the hour-long Saturday matinee of readings from Beckett texts by Fiennes, Neeson, McGovern and Julianne Moore. Among the readings was a passage from the short story "The Expelled," published, like "First Love," in 1946. Its protagonist is a dour brute not far from the nameless necrophile in "First Love," and Fiennes again took the role. He describes walking down a city street when "I had to fling myself to the ground to avoid crushing a child. He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells, he must have taken himself...
...watch the big Hollywood movies; for edification they go, in much smaller numbers, to the American indies, which have replaced foreign films as the higher-IQ supplement. Another reason is, frankly, that the foreign stuff isn't as exciting as it once was. The preferred art-film mode is dour minimalism, in which glum folks surrender to cosmic torpor in front of a static camera. Even as the pulse of world entertainment, from pop movies to video games to YouTube clips, is revving up, the pedigreed European film is getting slower and grimmer...
...tough. Eight years ago, she cut her father, her two brothers and her sister out of her life as she single-mindedly pursued her tennis ambitions. In post-match interviews, her icy mood appeared the same whether she won or lost. Her dour demeanor contrasted poorly with that of her fellow Belgian tennis rival Kim Clijsters, whose joie de vivre and conviviality lit up the women's circuit...
...good-government egghead. He derided the gas-tax holiday as the gimmick it was, gambling that Democrats would see through the ruse. He trudged through the Wright debacle, never allowing his impeccable disposition to slip toward anger or pettiness. On the Sunday before the primaries, he gave a dour, newsless interview to Tim Russert, enduring another 20 minutes of questions about the Reverend Wright. Meanwhile, Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with George Stephanopoulos. She made alpha-dog power moves, standing up to talk to the live audience while Stephanopoulos remained seated, forcing him to stand uncomfortably...
...students emerge from dorms armed with fistfuls of posters. By 7:02, students in various stages of undress begin to segregate by event. The air is tense, the voices low. The Eleganzians clear their throats and glance at the Rock for a Reason-ians. The Secular Society stands aloof, dour with morning tiredness and atheism...