Word: glumly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sunny impudence, plays a blend of his two most famous roles: the sassy kid from Family Ties and the cherubic go-getter in the Back to the Future trilogy. And Hurt, Hollywood's white-collar star, mines wit and pain from a static character. The actor can get wondrously glum when he plays a smart guy flummoxed by fate, which is why he should have been cast as the hero-victims in Presumed Innocent and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Instead he got The Doctor, whose style -- earnest and low key, with a dash of irony -- complements Hurt...
...want to get really glum about women's roles in current movies, look at the old ones. Of course, golden-age Hollywood didn't waste time on the war of the worlds; it was defining the battle of the sexes, and here the woman often won. Because she was better. Joan Crawford, as mom and career woman in Mildred Pierce (1945), could handle herself and a gun with steely assurance. And as a playwright in Sudden Fear (1952), she was smart enough to write her way out of her psychopathic husband's clutches. Could Julia Roberts have pulled that...
From this rather glum moral, the 1978 Nobel laureate spins a lively, hectic tale. Singer's language, as translated from the Yiddish by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz, retains its astonishing speed and vigor, an economy of storytelling technique scarcely matched in this century. The year is 1906, and Max Barabander, saddened by the death of his adolescent son and the consequent coldness of his wife Rochelle, leaves Buenos Aires, where he has made a good living selling "houses and lots," to return to his native Poland "to perpetrate," he says, "he knew not what...
Dread of aging and death, whether by illness or murder, hovers over many of Spark's characters, but that does not make the author glum. Unlike Margaret, who is criticized by her husband for liking "art to have an exalted message whereas if there was anything he hated in art, as in life, it was a sermon," Spark seems to believe that the only sensible way to consider serious questions -- religion and guilt, insanity and illumination, free will and destiny -- is with lightly lethal humor...
...this is easier said than done, especially when people are feeling glum (and when the elderly vote and preschoolers don't), so I say, spike the water...