Word: overwrought
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...blank-box modernism. It is a nice irony that the small hotel he and his partner, Charles Menefee, 32, designed for a river-bluff site outside Charleston, S.C., is such an unapologetically modernist work. The Middleton Inn, elegant and Miesian in the best senses, is complicated but not overwrought, decorous but not formulaic...
...over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century and a mad one, between well-behaved traditionalism and liberated modernism -- but nowhere was the sense more highly refined than in hothouse Vienna. Right now, on each side of the Atlantic, that singular, overwrought time and place is evoked in two remarkable museum shows...
...town streets ashiver; dramatic lighting illuminates a face from no earthly source. The two Brads share an idyllic toke of "wacky tobaccy," gazing out at the rolling Appalachian farmland. Brad Sr. sits at the center of a Last Supper tableau of thieves, looking like Jesus looking for Judas. Every overwrought gesture, every pregnant banality, every brutal killing is elongated to impress upon us the moment's importance and sick beauty. This fetishized attention to detail produces some gorgeous picturemaking, even as it makes At Close Range a sort of Atrocity Olympics captured in Super SloMo...
...OTHER CHARACTERS fall just a little short. As the daughter-in-law, Glynn is trapped in a one-dimensional role, handicapped by the shallowness of the script. We are constantly alerted to the fact that she is a heartless, tacky bitch, but the character is so overwrought that, despite some hints of depth, we never see enough complexity really to identify with her. Ditto for Thelma (Rebecca De Mornay), a young woman whom Page befriends in a bus station on the way to Bountiful. De Mornay's character is so unflinchingly sweet that when she suddenly and inexplicably disappears from...
...jury as a freeloading layabout: "He was living off her money, and he was living well. The defendant was well aware of what he would get if his wife died." The prosecution's first witness was Mrs. Von Bulow's maid of 23 years, Maria Schrallhammer, an overwrought, slightly bowed woman who could have stepped out of a whodunit. Schrallhammer recounted how her mistress had slipped into a coma while Von Bulow, sitting unperturbed on the bed reading in his bathrobe and pajamas, resisted calling a doctor for nearly five hours. "I picked her up and was holding...