Word: gloweringly
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...Remember Me takes itself more seriously than that. It's concerned with human connections, with the art of grieving, with fate. Big picture stuff. Like the possibility, say, that you could be riding on a train with your boyfriend and the same guy who killed your mother might glower at you from a corner. Or worse. The final twist of Will Fetters' screenplay has already been revealed in some reviews (there are small clues in the film, but it is obvious only if you, like critics, see too many movies). It won't be here, although I see the temptation...
...Anyway, he's the first director we know of to spin this sweet fantasy out into a 2½-hr., four-language epic. Receiving its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival, Inglourious Basterds - first word as in "glower," second as in "turds" - is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, the Palme d'Or winner 15 years ago. As with all of his recent work - the two Kill Bill movies and Death Proof - Basterds draws portraits of strong women facing down evil men; and in Shoshanna (Mélanie...
...lying when he promised the anxious parents of 1940 that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Always be sincere, Harry Truman said, even if you don't mean it. The presidency is less an office than a performance: Who saw the gloom and glower behind Eisenhower's incandescent grin? This is why temperament descends easily into caricature: the feisty Give-'Em-Hell Harry, the cool-as-crystal Kennedy, the Vesuvian Lyndon Johnson. "We've taken temperament and turned it," warns presidential historian Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University, into "vaudeville...
...There's the noble costume drama, beautifully appointed but with all the zazz of a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum; the political documentary, confirming its audience's liberal prejudices about the failings of everyone who doesn't agree with them; and the minimalist European drama, where misfits glower silently at each other over their coffee cups, then (if we're lucky) explode into violence at the end. Put them all together, they spell Art Film, which comprises a tiny percentage of all movies made in a year...
Then too there's what Ropeik and others call "optimism bias," the thing that makes us glower when we see someone driving erratically while talking on a cell phone, even if we've done the very same thing, perhaps on the very same day. We tell ourselves we're different, because our call was shorter or our business was urgent or we were able to pay attention to the road even as we talked. What optimism bias comes down to, however, is the convenient belief that risks that apply to other people don't apply...