Word: inert
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...French had spent decades producing theories on liberty and equality, for which they regularly enjoyed stays in the Bastille. Franklin had produced no such theses but put those combustible ideas into practice. He was dimly understood to be an American general; he was so much an anomaly in socially inert France that he was repeatedly addressed as Monsieur de Franklin. This frontier philosopher was dripping in honorary degrees. He wrung a great deal of mileage out of being thought a Quaker, which he was not. Every religion claimed Franklin, groused John Adams, who knew that his colleague had little...
...some respects, the brilliant strategies that preserved luxury brands a decade ago have now rendered them somewhat inert at retail. "All the same streets have the same stores with the same window dressing," complained designer Paul Smith at an industry gathering late last year. That's why one of the hottest stores, Colette, in Paris, is a reseller, not a brand-name designer boutique. Colette is a store as editor, picking the hottest stuff from the hottest new designers and presenting it in a techno-style space. Given the brisk traffic in the store, it's no wonder the designer...
Some of the evidence for this comes from related research on bones. Most people think of bones as inert objects whose only job is to keep our bodies from collapsing into a puddle of flesh. But bones are actually quite active tissues, constantly building and rebuilding themselves from the inside out. Anytime you break a bone, the body produces repair proteins that direct cellular activities as the bone knits itself together. When investigators take these so-called osteogenic proteins and sprinkle them on laboratory samples of damaged cartilage, the cartilage begins to repair itself...
...trick in a movie aiming at romantic refinement is to avoid being either pushy or inert. There Possession fails, certainly in the modern half of the story. Actors preen overmuch; Paltrow again imitates Englishness by sucking in her suave cheeks; Eckhart (a LaBute regular) works too hard at being the outspoken American abroad. Gabriel Yared's music is forced to do the actors' emoting for them--a sure sign the director doesn't trust the story to carry the feeling...
...Aesthetically, much of Williams' work vacillates between inert and abysmal. The rural comedy of "Juke Joint" is logy, as if the heat had gotten to the movie; even the musical scenes, featuring North Texas jazzman Red Calhoun, move at the turtle tempo of Hollywood's favorite black of the period, Stepin Fetchit. And there were technical gaffes galore: in a late-night scene in "Dirty Gertie," actress Francine Everett clicks on a bedside lamp and the screen actually darkens for a moment before full lights finally come up. Yet at least one Williams film, his debut "Blood of Jesus...