Word: perfective
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...this is a Stanford thing - it's really about the damage to your alma mater. Well, even Stanford guys aren't perfect (present company excepted, of course), but as you've noted, his image was about class and elegance. It's that image that has been shattered, sort of like the back window of his SUV, but maybe I'm pushing another metaphor too hard...
Cooley was one of the original smoke jumpers, firefighters who parachute into remote blazes, often in deep wilderness. His first attempt was less than perfect--which was perhaps not surprising, considering that he had never been in an airplane before he took his practice runs. In July 1940, Cooley and a colleague leaped out of a plane over a fire in Idaho. Cooley's parachute lines became tangled on the way down, and he landed in the branches of a spruce tree. But the pair brought the blaze under control by the following morning...
...earnestness, Palin also has a media pro's awareness of herself as a TV construct. Summing up her family's public experience for Barbara Walters, she said, "Our life has become kind of a reality show." It's a near perfect analogy. Like a reality contestant, she was plucked from nowhere (or a Bridge to Nowhere), "cast" for her dynamism and compelling personal story. Like a good reality-show premise, she pushed every cultural hot button in reach (gender, parenting, sex, class resentment). And as with that of Jon and Kate Gosselin, her fame devolved into a tabloid feud, with...
...actors like James Dean and Heath Ledger, politicians like Jack and Bobby Kennedy - are robbed of life but also of aging and decay. They are frozen at the apex of their beauty, power and promise. So lovers like Mateo, and movie lovers like the rest of us, have that perfect vision as a perpetual keepsake. Almodóvar knows it too: a dead love never dies...
...interpretation of domestic strife, which might work well in another context, falls flat when juxtaposed with the quieter but far more affecting despair that permeates the rest of the film. Mortensen nearly resorts to similar overacting in the flashbacks, but he redeems himself in the main narrative with a perfect balance of subdued hopelessness and occasional sparks of faith. Rarely raising his voice above a low mumble, the father is still as vibrant a character as Mortensen has ever played. Smit-McPhee also impresses, with wide-eyed innocence tempered by ever-present sadness...