Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language. She just rambles...
...Those earnest souls who passed the early decades of this once dangerous, vulnerable actor's career awaiting his Hamlet are doubtless going to be dismayed that his first sustained screen appearance since becoming eligible for Social Security is not in something sort of Lear-ish. But The Freshman is no small thing. Well, actually, it is a small thing. But to a moviegoer deafened by and reeling from the rolling barrage laid down by the early summer's big box-office guns, the determined modesty, the unsprung affability of Andrew Bergman's comedy are precisely what make it treasurable...
...four rooms in a dormitory at the University of Southern California look like the field office of a political campaign. The hallway is cluttered with ( stacks of paper. Phones ring incessantly. Earnest young workers scurry from room to room...
...happy camper. Cost cutting is under way, firings are the order of the day, and a terrorist is threatening to do some eliminating of his own. For a lark, Sasser decides to probe, just the way his fictional heroes do. Thereafter troubles and murders begin in earnest. Tucker wanders a bit, tells some good jokes and provides a smashing and surprising denouement, in a dirigible high over Giants Stadium during a Monday-night football game...
...trouble with the law since he was a child, but he has been extra careful since his last arrest two years ago. He wears his brown hair short, but not punk short, and he has no tattoos or earrings. He wears a blue Windbreaker and jeans. He is earnest, painstakingly sincere and a walking encyclopedia of the I.R.A. party line -- he has carefully shed any trace of the sly, irreverent wit common to his neighbors. John has been trained in firearms, explosives and withstanding police interrogation, and admits that he has assisted in a few "operations...