Word: offhandedly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CHARLIE PARKER IS ONE BIRD you can't catch. Parker, who died in 1955, was a jazz innovator, a sax master, a wildly talented instrumentalist who could improvise his way through songs with an easy daring and offhand profundity. Saxophonists who pay too literal tribute to Bird's work miss its spark and point--its emotionality is linked to its originality...
...Linney takes the Hepburn part of Linda Seton, of the megamoneyed Fifth Avenue Setons. Linda is a would-be free spirit who falls for her straitlaced sister's fiance, a poor-born but quick-climbing lawyer. Though Linney has brightness and passion, Hepburn's telltale intonations--everything from her offhand pluckiness to her tremulous indignation--keep surfacing. As the fiance, Tony Goldwyn has better luck sliding out from under Grant's broad-shouldered shadow, although he escapes partly through lack of intensity; he doesn't fully engage us in his struggle between the two sisters, between prestige and fulfillment...
Cool is something these folks wear like a dinner jacket; their offhand wit is so studied that their bull sessions seem like a final they crammed for. But the writer-director is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings--more than the sum of their chiseled jokes. Baumbach is a find, of sorts: he has both comic sense and camera sense. Imagine Quentin Tarantino without the guns...
...campus where discussion of important issues is often confined to offhand remarks around the dinner table, last week's open forum on the Core was a refreshing change. The discussion was sponsored by the 11 members of the Undergraduate Council's Student Committee on Undergraduate Requirements and represented the culmination of a semester's worth of committee meetings...
...Barcelona" with a faster pulse or maybe "Friends" on PBS, "Kicking and Screaming" is a postmodern comedy of manners in which hyperarticulate twentysomethings talk about the imminent threat of becoming thirtysomethings. Writer-director Noah Baumbach's characters wear cool like a dinner jacket, says TIME's Richard Corliss; their offhand wit is so studied that their bull sessions seem like a final they crammed for. "But Baumbach is canny enough to salt the stew with poignance, so that by the end these attitude machines have become human beings, more than the sum of their chiseled jokes. Baumbach is a find...