Word: geniality
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Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington's colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that genial urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony...
...sailed with him and cruised with him and he was a superb skipper and a most genial companion,” Perkins said...
...Bana gives every indication of being a genial fellow who loves his wife Rebecca and their two young children ("I have absolutely no interest in mindlessly pursuing my career at the expense of my marriage - life's too short"), his mates ("Eighty percent of my friends are guys I've known since preteens") and his 1970s-era muscle cars ("I was the boy who was crazy on cars. I'd had a car since I was 14 - an Aussie-made Ford coupe. People back home still ask, 'Have you still got that huge, white, thumping...
...director Patrice Ch?reau and included Bollywood diva Aishwarya Rai and Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen, deemed only four films worthy of prizes?the lowest number in memory. They also went out of their way to reward movies that were moderate in tone (except for Elephant): the winners included a genial comedy-drama about a dying professor (French Canada's The Barbarian Invasions), a minimalist study of two cousins getting on each other's nerves (the Turkish Uzak), and the one Asian awardee, At Five in the Afternoon, set in Afghanistan and directed by 23-year-old Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf...
...tone of apocalyptic despair. Brazilian director Hector Babenco ended his Carandiru with the slaughter of innocents in a São Paulo jail. Austrian Michael Haneke depicted the moral chaos attending an unspecified disaster in his testy The Time of the Wolf. Even Denys Arcand's genial The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian billet-doux to a dear, dying scoundrel, featured a jarring clip of a hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center. And the two main Palme d'Or contenders showed how the world could end in America: with a bang. Dogville - like Von Trier's best-known...