Word: face
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...Austin, Texas, fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci, financed his first feature himself. The director turned out to be a good investment for the producer. Nuance, not flash, is his forte. Playing to Firth's subtleties, he photographs the actor's handsome, mourning face in caressing close-up. (In his professor glasses, Firth looks like a young, more studious Michael Caine.) Ford is also attentive to the varieties of Southern California sunlight, which lends A Single Man an orangey warmth that should touch all who see the picture. But it's Firth's performance...
Tone is all in a social fable, and first-time writer-director Derrick Borte shows an impressive command of mood and pace. He doesn't push your face into the message of conspicuous consumerism; he lets the characters and actors breathe, allows viewers to detect the toxic undertaste in their own good time. In its amiable, ambling way, The Joneses is a zeitgeist film: it says as much as a Michael Moore screed about the American way of debt. It's also a feature-long joke about Hollywood's mania for product placement...
...center-right coalition. As the first reports of the Thursday-morning bombing - which also killed 10 Afghan civilians - at an outdoor market in Kabul came in, the Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs both forcefully declared Italy's resolve to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan in the face of what Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa called a "cowardly" and "devious" attack...
...Italy and elsewhere, that leaves space for populists like Bossi to harvest new supporters by leading the charge for a fast pullout. These days Berlusconi is more vulnerable to recalcitrant allies in the face of near daily blowback from a private-life scandal that began in April when his estranged wife accused him of "frequenting underage females...
...Still, columnist Romano believes that Berlusconi's nod to public doubts about Italy's role in Afghanistan is outweighed by the reality that the Prime Minister must ultimately stick with Washington. Other European leaders face the same dilemma, especially now that U.S. President Barack Obama has arrived with a new approach to diplomacy that largely jibes with Europe's. "In the end, all you can really do is keep your soldiers there and accompany them until the day that Obama sees it is O.K. for a pullback," says Romano. "It's a very passive diplomacy, but it's not irrational...