Word: plainness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exciting and fresh. As sophomores, they have acquired a "Been there, done that" cynicism that makes them doubt that any truly new experiences await them. Others, however, take a far more negative attitude than this general ennui. They may even feel that much of their life was just plain bad, and they begin wondering why they are living their lives in this way when it makes them so unhappy...
...minimalist documentary style, while ostensibly unassuming, is as intense as the Gouldian world it unfolds for us on the screen. The film's fragments wrap us up and then just as quickly unwind--the detached psychological probing is as disorienting as it is seductive. Pain, passion and the just plain weird are glimpsed and strangely haunt the blurry liminal spaces between art and life...
...case at hand, the people to whom the authority was delegated just plain blew it, and have managed to alienate the faculty in addition," he writes...
Household names on the marquee do not, of course, guarantee dramatic splendor inside. The Branagh play is a trifle that searches for nightmare poetry in "plain old American-Irish English" and for political significance in the story of a Belfast punk (Paul Ronan) obsessed by the grit and grace of Jimmy Cagney. It finds none of the above, lost as it is in a muddle of moralizing and attitudinizing. But it shares a potent theme with the season's cannier off-Broadway ventures: that star worship is a virus, carried by the popular media and infecting anyone...
...bracing about such creatures, especially when no whiny attempts are made to justify their malignity. The grace that redeems a wretch like Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction is her breathtaking lack of hypocrisy. She's economic woman on an intricate and divinely sociopathic rampage. She just plain wants the money she steals from her husband (Bill Pullman), who obtained it in a drug deal that she had urged on him. She just plain needs to create a new life so she can hide from his wrath. And she just plain must enlist simple Mike Swale (Peter Berg...