Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...typical Halberstam style, roughly chronologically, with long profiles of the principals welded elegantly into the text. The story, in sum, is of failure. This is not a good season for the Blazers, a team that had won the league championship just two years before with an exuberant and earnest young team. Much has changed since then. The star player, Bill Walton, has succumbed to his imperfect body, been traded and turned against his former employer for treatment of his injuries. Maurice Lucas, the powerful forward, has grown embittered over his unsatisfactory ($300,000) salary, and his play has suffered. Jack...
...Fraser playes Willy Loman, the aging salesman, and he rivets us with a powerful performance. Willy is effective because he utterly fails to understand, despite an earnest search, why his life has turned sour. Miller carefully inserts a few segments from Willy's past that vividly expose the story of his wasted life and parade the painful truths about Willy's life, built on self-delusion. This dreamworld derails as he starts repeatedly running off the road while traveling on his weekly sales trips to New England. After 36 years, the long-distance drives are too much...
...pretensions to seriousness and the results were pretty sad. With Bruce Dern as a fired-up army officer, Jane no-that's-not-me-in-the-love-scene-but-that-was-me-in-Barbarella Fonda as his wife and Jon Voight as a crippled vet, everyone is too damn earnest. The depth of the emotional struggles in the movie makes Ordinary People look like a model of complexity. And when Dern bares his buns for that catharsis/baptism, you want to vomit. Any ninth-grader could have written that...
Even those who ended up opposing him said that Reagan relied on an earnest appeal, without threatening or cajoling, wheeling or dealing. He told Minnesota Republican David Durenberger, a Roman Catholic, that the Pope would have voted for AWACS. Said Durenberger: "Lyndon Johnson would have talked to me about an airbase in Duluth." Reagan was "soft but firm," said Democrat Wendell Ford of Kentucky, and exuded such sincerity that "I'd hate to play poker against him." Washington Republican Slade Gorton recalled that when Reagan called to offer condolences on the death of his mother, "I kept expecting...
...wild, hazy Scottish moors where he lives, Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) explains to his earnest sister his motivation for running: "God made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure." Liddell plans on a missionary career in China, but first he must spread public awareness of the Lord by himself acquiring worldwide renown. His sister fears that fame will corrupt the purity of his soul, but she needn't worry. Liddell refuses to race in the Olympic preliminary heats because they occur on Sunday; instead, he delivers a sermon in church...