Word: layers
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...grows, the play fortunately grows with them. The comedy becomes less superficial, more an organic product of the characters' grouping attempts to find stability in the midst of flux. Coupled with the increasing richness of the humor-and this play is in parts very, very funny-is an underlying layer of sadness, an awareness of the inevitability of change in a world where "it seems like it's just one damn thing after another...
...months, so some air must get to it but flies must not. The answer in Ishikawa prefecture is to sheathe it in straight wisps of straw and then bind it in straw rope like a corn husk, unwrap as much as you need, cut it off, close the inner layer of straw, retie the bundle. Such packaging uses humble materials with breathtaking panache: witness a bottle for sweet sake from Tokyo, coarse brown earthenware capped with a mottled sheet of bamboo bark and tied with creeper - an ordering of color and texture so fine as to annihilate (by comparison...
...Sizemore is a coal miner who has practically no money and lives in a rented house in Appalachia, where the hallow he lives in is choked in a layer of "red dog" coal slag left by the strippers for "surface miners," as the industry calls them). He's been broke more than once, drives a '68 Ford after going three years without one and wheezes like a train when he walks around because he has second-stage black lung. He lives in a place where school teachers quote from the National Enquirer and where the deputy sheriff pistol-whipped...
Murder on the Orient Express emphasizes the sentimental aspects of the Agatha Christie novel it's based on. It presents no layer of cynicism to be penetrated, the kind of tough-minded shell Bogart provided to make sure the final pill wasn't too sweet to swallow. The moral situation on the Orient Express is black and white, and the detective shares everyone's assumptions about right and wrong. There can be no classic confrontations because at bottom everyone agrees. This film doesn't have the kind of hypnotic effect that leaves you spouting its dialogue days later...
...young anthropology assistant burst into the campsite in Ethiopia's remote Awash Valley, he was so excited that he could hardly gasp out the news. Only five minutes' walk from the tents, he had just spotted a completely intact human-like jawbone sticking out from under a layer of volcanic rock on the shore of a dry lake. Alemayehu Asfaw figured that the fossil was at least as old as the rock-and the rock had already been dated as more than 3 million years...