Word: gruffness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pitt's character, both in writing and in performance, is similarly underdeveloped at first. We get the image of an inexplicably angry young man, unsatisfied with his family and domestic associations. Pitt's gruff, distracted and distant demeanor, his clipped and uncompassionate manner, is convincing he is by no means likable. In fact, as the audience does not identify or sympathize with him on his pre-Tibet misadventures, the movie's first half seems aimless, and Annaud dangerously skirts the edge of alienating the audience by depriving them of something to latch onto...
...voiced by Tate Donovan) is your basic mythic hybrid--half man, half deity--recast as a clumsy teen. Superman-strong and Bambi-naive, Herc is an ideal foil for wily Meg (a subtle siren, wonderfully voiced by Susan Egan). She plays Barbara Stanwyck to his Eddie Bracken, while a gruff satyr (Danny DeVito) acts as Herc's mentor and parries the anti-Olympus scheming of Hades (James Woods...
...this life, then in eternity. Death is a "sweet bluebonnet spring" ("When we die we say we'll catch some blackbird's wings/ And we will fly away to heaven") in the gorgeous remake of her Gulf Coast Highway, a duet with Hootie's Darius Rucker. His gruff baritone and Griffith's twangy soprano soar apart, then join in double rapture. The instrumentation--string quintet, Floyd Cramerish rolling piano, electric slide guitar--makes the song a pretty little anthology of pop's fine old tendency to synthesize, not isolate, strains of music. Listening in the Great Beyond to Griffith...
Nora Okja Keller used to think real writers looked like Ernest Hemingway. Gruff, bearded, white, male. She was none of those. She was an immigrant, born in Seoul to a Korean mother and a white American father, and raised in Hawaii. But Keller's image of herself started to change in 1993, when she went to a symposium on human rights at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; there she heard an elderly Korean woman tell her true story of being a "comfort woman" during World War II, when she was one of the many foreigners forced by the Japanese...
...pint of beer, a game of pool, a few confidences. For obvious reasons, Frankie has to be a little guarded in the last department. On the other hand, he became a terrorist because as a young boy he witnessed his father being gunned down by Unionist terrorists, and gruff-tough-sentimental-principled Tom fills an obvious need...