Word: glum
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While reform candidates shrank from direct contact with the people, offering only boring TV speeches and glum-faced round-table discussions on esoteric subjects during the election campaign, Zhirinovsky held regular Saturday- afternoon street-corner rallies drawing crowds that numbered in the thousands. For every constituency, he designed a tailor-made message. The military received pledges of a resurrected and expanded Russian Empire. Fixed- income pensioners and students were promised a decent standard of living. Crime-weary citizens were assured that gang leaders would be executed. Meanwhile, foreigners were offered up as scapegoats, and Jews were blamed for provoking anti...
Despite all the investigative talent, however, the mood was glum. Arson is a crime that erases its own evidence; a hundred leads may not make an arrest. Moreover, even if Fedbuster were caught and actually admitted to having set some of the fires, he could not have set them...
Syria, on the other hand, remains rather glum about the P.L.O.-Israeli deal. Although President Hafez Assad gave it distant approval, he is miffed at being made to look as if he is following Arafat in concluding an accord with Israel instead of playing the lead Arab role he prefers. He might also fear that the Israeli-P.L.O. agreement sets an uncomfortable precedent for his own negotiations to get the Golan Heights back from Israel. The Declaration of Principles foresees a gradual, step-by-step Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Assad seeks a total Israeli...
They constitute a glum triangle. It is extremely difficult to care which of the two guys may be the resident psychopath, and neither the script nor Phillip Noyce's direction creates a growing, compelling sense of menace around Stone's character. In fact, she is presented more as an object for study than as an object of sympathy -- that is to say, rather voyeuristically. It is, of course, possible to see this as artful irony, given the film's theme, but it feels more like carelessness. Or exploitation. Or simple imitation. For like Eszterhas' somewhat hotter, somewhat smarter Basic Instinct...
...course this show isn't the end of civilization as we know it, but it's glum, preachy, sophomoric and aesthetically aimless. Indifferent to pleasure, it becomes college-level art for college-level thinking about civic virtue. Part of the trouble is that the Whitney, like a swimmer clutching a spar, still clings to the romantic avant-garde idea that visual artists get to sense things before anyone else, that they are uniquely equipped with social antennae that tell us what's wrong with the world before other folk can cotton on to it. Apart from a small number...