Word: foil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sitcom with a genuinely intelligent character. At least, a character who didn't have some serious personality flaw to go along with the brainpower. No, that would threaten the average American. All those smart characters must have something wrong with them. They make the perfect kind of despicable foil--superior enough to resent, yet inferior enough to dismiss. The anti-intellectual American can rest easy...
...soliloquy comes in at a hurtling but affecting clip; Fiennes seems less concerned with weighing alternatives than with feverishly fending off suicide. He makes an athletic-looking prince, and he manages to appear beautifully, brainlessly exultant in the final scene, with fencing foil in hand-savoring a duel that he considers mere sport but that will bring his world crashing down. Throughout, he is marvelously complemented by Francesca Annis in the role of his mother. She gives us a queen who is convincing at each downward turn in her trajectory: as a figure of brittle jubilation when celebrating...
...Ronnie's foil is Kilmartin's baby sitter, Rosie (Katheryn Erbe). It would be easy to choke on this character's banal perfection, but Erbe somehow manages to flesh out a real person. While Rosie is usually too good to take, we are nevertheless swayed by Erbe's performance. Also noteworthy is Ving Rhames, who people may recognize as the band-aid wearing Marsalis from "Pulp Fiction." Here, like Jackson, he thrives on material more sophisticated than Tarantino's comicbook style...
...foil wrapper...
There is no practical difference between twenty and sixteen, as only one block in the past five years has been larger than sixteen members. Still, I would maintain that even a block size of eight is enough to foil the noble efforts of randomization's advocates...