Word: joylessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...known, now endure a subpar life. Dash is punished at school for flashing his gift of meta-speed. Violet, who can disappear, is invisible to the boy she adores. Mom, now called Helen, copes with raising two troubled kids, while Mr. Incredible, now just plain Bob, faces a joyless desk job with thinning hair and a gigantic spare tire. He still does furtive good deeds, but when he makes a celebratory air punch, he throws his back out. He sounds like an ex--high school football star mired in memories as he says, "Reliving the glory days is better than...
...weather is always inclement, the protagonists are all muddy when they're not bloody, King Arthur's Christianity is muscular but joyless, and Guinevere is often daubed with blue paint. No, folks, we're not in Camelot anymore. Mostly we're in and around Hadrian's Wall in Britain at the dawn of the Dark Ages, with the Romans in retreat, the Saxons advancing and the severely downsized Knights of the Round Table defending civilization as they know it. Conditions in this world are not visibly much different from barbarism. Life on this frontier is rude and basic, though Guinevere...
...somewhat resembles is Last Tango in Paris--you know, people shutting themselves away from the world to indulge their sexual fantasies. But that film, which was rated X, had an authentic sexual charge. This one--which carries an NC-17, the modern equivalent of an X--is grim and joyless, though it is far richer and more casual in its display of both male and female frontalia...
...attribute people’s being flattened in Wal-Mart parking lots to Increase Mather, Will’s indictment of Puritanism is hardly unique. In section and dining hall discussions, “Puritan” may be understood as shorthand for “obsolete, sexually repressed, joyless prude.” It is one of Harvard’s milder ironies that vilifying Puritans has become something of a pastime at the College that was once a cradle of the Puritan orthodoxy. In October, on this very page, for instance, Joe P. Flood quoted Ambrose Bierce?...
...have boldly decided to go into essentially unmapped box-office territory and show some of our old movie pals nakedly enjoying elder sex. The theory is swell, even inviting to those of us not yet confined to our chimney corners. But alas, the films in question are smirky and joyless...