Word: glum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...played by Kim Basinger, Nadia lacks what farce needs, irresistible nuttiness. She is simply a whiner. Director Edwards (The Party, S.O.B.) is a great farceur, and he has plenty of classic comic conventions to play with: elegant cars and parties to crash, a decorous wedding to subvert. But glum Nadia defeats him. A film promising knockout knockabout comedy finally seems merely knocked...
...radiation leak soon enough, had he thought through the consequences of trying to keep the catastrophe a secret and had he openly invited foreign scientists and technicians to help put out the fire, Gorbachev might have scored a brilliant diplomatic success. But by acquiescing to the Soviet instinct for glum silence, he showed anew that he remains very much a creature of the stolid system that brought him to power...
Like many of his generation in Europe, Mies was proudly glum, an earnest young Spenglerian. The present cycle of civilization was tapped out, it seemed to him. Sweat and serendipity were anachronisms; the future looked to be a matter of machines and bureaucracy. "The individual is losing significance," Mies wrote in 1924. "His destiny is no longer what interests us." And yet has any individual had a greater impact on architecture, ever, than Mies...
...Avedon is not absorbed by the reporter's task of showing how these people look and dress, or with acknowledging the full range of their emotional lives. Instead, against these blank white backgrounds he has projected the shapes of what appears to be his < own dejection, finding in each glum expression the corollary of a private somber mood. Yet the exhibition is also more than a magic-lantern display of the photographer's psychic woes. Looking through the lens of his temperament, he has sighted one more mythical West, this time a place to represent all places where hopes...
...myth of the cowboy is like the light, just arriving now, from a star that died long ago. In the actual world, ranchers have trouble hiring cowboys today. Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy interminably working a few strays down a fenceline in the distance on a glum, gray afternoon in West Texas knows why. The real cowboys...