Word: dourness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...commentators did not do a very distinguished job. It was purely as a wide onlooking eye that TV served a magnificent function. It authenticated the improbable events and gave them a rich, subtle reality. The attentive world could see the look on Sadat's mobile face - so dour at rest, then suddenly exploding in his quick laughter; could watch the effect on Begin, the glint in his eye; and could see the Israeli children waving Arab flags. When Sadat returned to Cairo, anyone inclined to think - from reading a paper - that his welcome there was staged could watch...
...Hoor, hoor [Hear, hear]!" shouted the square-jawed Afrikaner farmers and their dutiful wives, as one speaker after another referred to the guest of honor as "a gladiator," "a saint" and "a savior." Dour and unsmiling, he sat stolidly, barely nodding his acknowledgment of the eulogies. When at last he took the platform, surrounded by the orange, white and blue posters of the National Party, which has ruled South Africa for 29 years, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 61, could almost have been stepping to a throne...
Then too there is Nader's annoying holier-than-thou attitude. In an attempt to shed his dour reputation, Nader in January showed up on TV as host of the zany NBC's Saturday Night Live. In one routine he deadpanned his way through a comic turn satirizing none other than Ralph Nader. The effort backfired in one respect: though the skit was indeed amusing, Nader portrayed himself altogether too accurately as a driven zealot. Congressmen agree that Nader does his homework, but they are repelled by his insistence that his position is the only morally right...
Bonnie Zimering as the Mute is a refreshing fountain of understatement. Her careful, graceful mime and dour expression accented by simple, effective make-up, transforms her role from a piece of furniture and dispenser of props into a wise and mournful critic of what goes on around her. She is sophisticated without being aloof, sympathetic but not saccharine...
...trappings of an American political campaign trip: advance men running around with clipboards; overly efficient volunteers bossing one another and everyone else around; dour Secret Service agents in double-knit suits mumbling to one another through microphones hidden up their sleeves. At the center of the hubbub, surrounded by a phalanx of plainclothesmen, was "the Man"-bald, stocky and distinguished by the world's most famous eye patch...