Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...aural gamut from fuzzy lounge-lizard pop to gritty reverb rock (and most often are a synth-washed mix of both). Through it all, though, they manage to give you the cold shoulder. Morgane Lhote's Moog must have a special dial for "disaffected": a breath of chilling ennui blows through all their music, a vague sense of world-weary aloofness that has its heart somewhere in songwriter Sadier's low-mixed lyrics...
...Frank Darabont, "doing time" means taking it. As the adapter and director of two Stephen King prison stories, Darabont is a man with a slow hand. He wants you to share the agony of ennui felt by jailbirds whose only job is marking time while scheming to escape or waiting to die--just like the rest of us. In The Shawshank Redemption he managed to invest this anxious leisure with tension and transcendence...
...Year's Eve, of course, is known for disappointment, freighted with the pressure to be the wildest night of the year but often ending in ennui, regret and beer stains. Is this one simply shaping up to be a letdown on a millennial scale? Not necessarily. Party planners and business people predict that customers will start filling hotels, parties and restaurants in the next few weeks--especially if prices drop enough...
...Though not conveyed in the most ingenious manner, these themes in Dogma remain provocative, to say the least. They often take the form of shots at the church (to lessen the ennui, a churchgoer reads "Hustler" during a service Bethany attends), but never do they lead to God-bashing. You see, Smith doesn't satirize God, per se--he satirizes the inadequate human perception of God. Our quest to interpret the will of the divine has lead humans to murder, war, persecution, suspicion, and a bevy of other moral wrongs. The funny (and much less extreme) situation that Smith uses...
...Fight Club is not the first time someone has tried to grapple with yuppie angst. When the New Beetle was unveiled in 1998, the cough-drop-on-wheels was touted as the ultimate antidote to the ennui of the under-40 crowd. It was deja vu all over again: here was the "Love Bug," the charmingly rotund little symbol of all things flower-power, updated for the era of power-lunches. The folks at Volkswagen hoped to invoke the freewheeling Age of Aquarius (when most yuppies were too young or to stoned to care), making every yupster on the planet...