Word: manic
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...Kusturica theory. This year's Jury President is a forceful fellow - some would translate that as madman - and, reportedly, thisclose to Jim Jarmusch; hence talk that he could persuade the jurors to choose Broken Flowers. He might be looking for the kind of films he makes: big, bustling, manic movies about displaced persons. Two films fitting that description are Marco Tullio Giordano's illegal-immigrant drama Once You're Born and the nutsy-sexy Mexican Battle in Heaven. A third, as Cannes' official announcer Patrick Fabre told me at a swank party where we sat at the same table with...
...keyboard riff that makes him sound awfully, uh, considerate. Bloc Party Helicopter While aspiring to postpunk art-house dance music, Bloc Party wisely refuses to let its genre fixations get in the way of tunefulness. There's an actual melody here, and a good one, driven on by the manic playing of Matt Tong, rock's best new drummer in years. Bruce Springsteen Devils & Dust The title track from the Boss's new album starts with a gentle acoustic strum, gains steam on the backs of evocative nouns (blood, stone, bone) and peaks with a harmonica solo. It's nothing...
...driving this thing? More than anybody else it's a manic, shaven-headed character named J Allard. (Yes, it's just the one letter.) In 1993, as a 25-year-old wunderkind Microsoftie, Allard wrote an 11-page memo that almost single-handedly persuaded Gates that maybe personal computers should be able to connect to something known as the Internet. Now a 36-year- old V.P., Allard is one of the few people who can get the Microsoft juggernaut to change direction; he's known as one of the "Baby Bills," the company's young up-and-comers, and Gates...
...Where the Truth Lies can be quickly dismissed. There's piquancy in the plot (from a Rupert Holmes novel), about a blond corpse discovered in the hotel suite of a comedy team - smooth Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and manic Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) - and the efforts of a young journalist (Alison Lohmann) to solve the case. Such a tale, set in two periods, the glitzy 1950s and shaggy 70s, might have had some period effervescence. But the concoction here is flatter than a long-opened bottle of sham...
...Amateurs begins as straightforward coverage of the manic scramble for a handful of spots on the 1984 U.S. Olympic rowing team: "It was not a celebrated event ... no tickets were sold, and the community in which it was held, Princeton, New Jersey, largely ignored it." But a subtext soon makes itself apparent. Within a few pages the book becomes not merely an examination and celebration of one of the few authentic amateur sports. It is also a close analysis of addiction. For these rowers are, to a man, driven, single-minded, type-A combatants who make better companions...