Word: genial
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Americans who remember Ike at all tend to recall a do-little President or a mangler of sentences at press conferences. Military writers sometimes portray Ike the General as a genial and soothing Alliance board chairman at best, or at worst a glad-handing bumbler. Eisenhower the Supreme Commander was none of those. He was a driving, demanding man of terrific energy: up before dawn, to bed after midnight, chain-smoking four packs of cigarettes, drinking 15 cups of coffee a day. He was a military perfectionist, impatient with his subordinates and a peerless, lucid briefer. He had a volcanic...
...mildly, the genre is -- or was -- cynical and subversive. But given the power of humanistic piety in contemporary movies -- it is virtually the only acceptable tone for American films seeking an adult audience -- film noir, if it's done at all, is usually accompanied by nostalgic winks and genial, reassuring cues of self- consciousness. Just kidding, folks, say the filmmakers. Red Rock West, in contrast, is all furious conviction. Its humor is sardonic; its ironies are conveyed by violence; and its view of human nature is bleak...
...begins with two policemen falling into a comic argument over whether to let their prisoner, an army deserter, escape. The quarrel leads to one of them killing the other and then committing suicide. It climaxes with a priest -- a worldly and genial man -- hanging himself in his church. He has fallen into despair after too profound an exposure to the antireligious writings of the poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno...
...uptown daily. There are clever doses of cynicism and office politicking, but at heart The Paper wants to be a Front Page for the New Age; most of the tough talk is about ethics. "It was always the truth," intones the paper's columnist (Randy Quaid in a savvy, genial turn). And Henry snarls indignantly, "Not everything is about money...
There are movies so breezy, even flimsy, that you can enjoy them as genial providers of an evening's entertainment yet forget all about them by the time you leave the multiplex. Such a film is Four Weddings and a Funeral, a British romantic comedy with not much inside its pretty head but the spinning out of an ancient Hollywood riddle: How long will it take the two leading characters to realize that they are destined to be together...