Word: gruff
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...Falling Hare and Rabbit Seasoning -- have the limber wit of the cartoons that inspired them. Nor do the human actors add much. Hoskins, in a role for which Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray were considered, lacks their effortless star quality. He's more like an armor-plated Yosemite Sam, gruff and explodable. Only Christopher Lloyd, as the evil Judge Doom with a scheme even more nefarious than the one hatched by the burghers of Chinatown, easily straddles the film's two worlds...
...contrast, Czechoslovakia took an opening loss to West Germany with a gruff shrug. "They played with a bigger heart," said Jan Starsi, the Czechs' direct and wonderful coach. Surviving both the U.S. and its eight-year-old memory of the Lake Placid miracle, Soviet Assistant Coach Igor Dmitriev said, "We're very glad we won; our opponent was very strong. Our success was only thanks to our best efforts." And, referring to the spirited third-period comeback of the Americans, he added, "We forgot that here in North America, specifically in the U.S., they fight to the very...
...dramatic situation demands. There has always been a theatricality about Adams' music -- the 1981 Harmonium was a vivid choral setting of poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson -- and in Nixon its dramatic qualities have flowered. The figures are sharply characterized: Nixon (James Maddalena), for example, is a gruff baritone whose music is often stiff and halting, while Chairman Mao (John Duykers) is cast as a heldentenor. His body may be weak, but his mind and voice are as vigorous as Siegfried...
...century ago that the company turned innocuous soda water into what Berke Breathed has aptly described as "malted battery acid." Then, in the 1930s, it invented Santa Claus to tout its product. (Until then, Saint Nick had been a gruff, thin man. It's thanks to Coke that he's now a jolly bowl of jello...
Despite Bork's gruff but courteous style and ability to turn the hearings into a legal seminar, the "confirmation conversion" issue could keep him from winning Senate approval. The three swing men -- Republican Specter and Democrats DeConcini and Howell Heflin of Alabama -- expressed reservations about Bork's ever changing views. "There are those who raise the issue that your changing of your position," Heflin told Bork, "came only at a time when a carrot was being dangled before your eyes." Replied Bork: "I can assure you that that's not the way I operate...