Word: grimming
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...This was supposed to be the most serious, solemn, super-politicized Toronto International Film Festival ever. And we have had plenty of grim testimonies, both doc and mock, to terrorism in the pre- and post-9/11 world, from Alexander Oey's My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans Joachim Klein - which documents the seizing of OPEC Ministers in Vienna in 1975 by a commando brigade that included Klein and was led by Carlos the Jackal - to Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's meticulous, devastating The Prisoner: Or, How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, the story...
...back room, where Saleh tells him that a suicide bombing near the U.S. embassy, about a mile away, has killed two U.S. soldiers and 14 Afghans. It is the worst attack in the capital since the fall of the Taliban five years before, and for a moment, Karzai becomes grim. "Afghanistan has been going through this suffering for a long time," he says, "and you get very angry. Each time you get angrier." So how does he cope when every day seems to bring more tragedy? Karzai sighs. "We're used to it," he says...
Given such grim news five years after 9/11, it is all too easy to conclude that the Bush doctrine is a bust--that, at best, it has been ineffectual and that, at worst, it has actually exacerbated the woes it was meant to address. In truth, it is far too soon to judge the results of the President's grand strategy of transforming the Middle East, which is still in its early stages and which has never been pursued as ardently as his more grandiose rhetoric might suggest...
...Miami Vice, which featured the rip-snorting bedroom ballets of Gong Li and Colin Farrell. There was hunger in their encounters, and inexplicable need, and, for the audience, the joy of seeing two handsome people heedlessly enjoying one another. For reasons that probably have something to do with its grim and murky plot, the picture was, in Hollywood-speak, a commercial "disappointment." But contra the received wisdom (mostly emanating from people who don't go very often to them), movies need to be sexy. This is, I think, the prime source of their best energy, and for years...
...There is nothing new about the restrictions themselves. They were the grim reality of life here before the 1997 election of the liberalizer Mohammad Khatami. The difference today is the sporadic and velvet-gloved implementation of the old codes. Instead of announcing new bans or dispatching morality police onto the streets of Tehran to harass and arrest young people - the crude, classic measures that fomented much anger and discontent - the system is employing more subtle means that seek to make Iranians themselves, instead of uniformed agents of the state, the enforcers...