Word: ennui
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...Vermont. Suffering through classes with unimaginative students and dinners with pedantic colleagues, the disgruntled professor of Francine Prose's abrasively comic new novel, Blue Angel (Harper Collins; 314 pages; $25), can't wait to rush home so he can avoid writing his overdue third novel. In addition to battling ennui, Swenson must also contend with a forbidding campus environment fraught with race and gender minefields...
...brave of Michael Douglas, 55, to play a college professor who looks his age--and feels it. After a decade or so as the suave (or slimy) manipulator dodging a comeuppance from a strong (or psychotic) woman, Douglas renounces sexual energy and latches on to a kind of emotional ennui. In Wonder Boys he's unshaven, bespectacled Grady Tripp, who wrote an acclaimed novel years ago but has been marking time ever since. While working on his next book (he's up to page 2,613), he teaches the creative writing he may no longer be capable of and carries...
...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...