Word: gruffness
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Lucas may be obsessed with all things digital, but in this film he and co-writer Jonathan Hales also appear fully engaged with his flesh-and-blood characters. Obi-Wan, in the form of McGregor's bearded visage, is growing into the moral authority and gruff wit exuded by Alec Guinness as the fogie Kenobi in Star Wars. His exasperation with Anakin has a paternal tint. In that Coruscant night chase, Anakin is the car-crazy teenager of many Lucas films, and Obi-wan is the speed demon's nervous dad who regrets giving his son the keys...
Perchov, the novel's other, more successfully realized narrator, tells a very different tale. He acts as a translator when Foer takes a trip to Ukraine. Bluff, gruff and unflappable, he writes in broken English: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." (His English gets better--and less hilarious--as the book goes on.) Accompanied by Perchov's narcoleptic grandfather and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Foer and Perchov set off into the Ukrainian countryside to search for what's left of present-day Trachimbrod...
...comeback is not limited to TV ads. Producer Paul Fusco is pitching the gruff furball as host of a late-night talk show...
...9/11 finally focuses less on carnage than on people. There are the fire fighters of Engine 7, Ladder 1 (all of them, amazingly, survived), whom we meet as gruff wise guys and leave--through the Naudets' exclusive access to ground zero in the first days of the recovery operation--as war veterans. And there are the brothers, who shot tirelessly on Sept. 11, even though, until tearfully reunited that night, each believed the other was dead. "You have to do something," explains Gedeon. "You have to focus on your work, or you'll go crazy." In that way, on that...
...character to stay in a village when the rest of the world is rushing off to the city. Besides the occasional grandchild on holiday, no young people populate the lovely countryside. Bachelors predominate: there is the entrepreneur known as The Shah, who resolutely refuses marriage; Patrick Ryan, a gruff builder; Bill Evans, a survivor of Ireland’s horrific orphanages, who made it into old age quiet and strangely asexual. Gentle, blithe Jamesie and his wife Mary have grandchildren faraway in Dublin, while their friends Ruttledge and Kate, transplants from London, are childless. Because of the absence of children...