Word: effortful
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...there's anything to criticize in the 33-year-old director's sophomore effort (a follow-on from 2006's equally pastoral Stories from the North), it's that his high-definition images - all darkening clouds and lustrous green paddies - are too beautiful. Despite its share of grumbling about corrupt politicians, Agrarian Utopia quickly moves beyond some heavy-handed message movie toward Buddhist meditation. Uruphong's oppressed peasants are as much victims of their own restlessness as they are of meager rice prices. With a poet's eye, the sights and sounds of their close-to-nature existence are transformed...
...familiar box office priorities may reassert themselves next weekend, with the opening of Martin Scorsese's take on the violent horror-mystery story Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. If that pricey effort should tank, Hollywood may have to consider the unthinkable: letting the tastes of women and little children lead them to box-office gold...
...electric-car race is under way in Europe and countries are rushing out their plans for the future - each one more ambitious than the last - in an effort to prove who's the greenest of them all. Spain aims to have 1 million electric or hybrid cars on the road by 2014 (though it hasn't specified how many of each). Britain is trying to persuade Japanese automaker Nissan to make its Sunderland plant the European base for its little electric car the Leaf, and London plans to have 25,000 charging stations hooked up to the grid...
...Games, several countries complained that Canada limited competitors' access to the Whistler track for training, in an attempt to protect its home-turf advantage. The country has made no secret of its quest to top the medal tables at these events. The effort has even been solidified into an official winter-sport program called Own The Podium. "I think it could have been avoided," said American Steven Holcomb, the world's top bobsled driver, in an email message to TIME less than an hour before the start of the opening ceremony. "Limiting time on the fastest track in the world...
...Many observers saw the exercise as a political ploy - an effort by the conservative government to seduce extreme right-wing voters by fanning nationalist flames ahead of regional elections next month. Other critics said that while discussing French identity isn't objectionable in itself, people used the scores of open debates and the government's online forum to voice opinions that only served to offend public sensibilities. Some have even questioned whether the entire initiative may have backfired, doing more harm to Sarkozy's already tarnished image and undermining his party's chances in the March balloting. Early polls showed...