Word: englishing
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...Larita, the exotic American divorcée who sends her new upper-crust English in-laws into fits, Biel is more than just a pretty face. She's funny and poised, rather than simply posed, as so often is the result when directors are confronted with someone who makes everyone else look like mutton. There are a few moments when you sense the nervous tension inherent in an actress trying to make a breakthrough that could and should change her career, but they are outweighed by the number of times she's in command. She also has the most memorable...
...film itself is less of a revelation, a revisiting of familiar types and scenarios that are nicely executed but not exactly relevant beyond the pleasure of nostalgia. The Whittaker family members are classic examples of interwar, edging-toward-shabby English gentry, ready to be jolted into 20th century reality. The scissors-sharp matriarch (Kristen Scott Thomas) thoroughly disapproves of her son John's (Ben Barnes) taste in brides. He was supposed to marry Sarah (Charlotte Riley), the girl from the next castle over, who could have restored the family to its former glory. Instead he shows up with Larita...
...learned at Harvard is that etymology will improve almost any argument (or at least extend its length), let me begin with a brief history of the word. “Value” started from the Latin valere, passing through Old French before landing with a messy splash in English. An odd cluster of meanings branched from its two short syllables: it meant to be healthy, to be able, or to be worthy; when used to describe words, it also meant to be meaningful or to be significant. Somewhere along the way, the word evolved from describing a state...
...Double and undercover agents fill out the movie's other main plots. A German-born English officer, Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, of Hunger and Fish Tank), is sent by his OSS superior (Mike Myers in a low-key guest spot) to hook up in France with starlet Von Hammersmark, and thus get close enough to Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to kill them and end the war. (Two of the Reich's most beloved actresses, Zarah Leander and Olga Chekova, were later thought to be secret agents for the U.S.S.R.) Hicox and the actress rendezvous in a French...
...tank but a Mercedes-Benz; he could take Cannes' Best Actor prize on Sunday night. The movie is pretty scrupulously played in the languages its characters would speak - except for one odd moment early on, when Landa tells the French farmer, "I ask your permission to speak English for the rest of the conversation." (He and the film have a reason for this...