Word: plangent
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...place with a mordant irony. The revealing detail is his specialty: he recalls "an old monk brush, brush, brushing a pathway clean . . . a sitting Buddha imparting a peace so strong it felt like wisdom . . . Yet one could never forget the world entirely. Floating up from below came the sound, plangent and forlorn, of a garbage collector's truck playing its melancholy song...
...plays like Little Shop of Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden Broadway -- but for insiders, and good guessers, the musical malice has its own witty thrill...
...like Batman, this comic-book movie is anything but comic; every plangent chord of Danny Elfman's splendid pop-Wagnerian score underlines the scientist's twisted nobility. Raimi isn't effective with his actors, and the dialogue lacks smart menace, but his canny visual sense carries many a scene. And he knows how to give resonance to a tinny plot: by portraying a character so powerful and warped that he is urban America's perfect patron saint...
Against these plangent strings of personality is the oboe howl and twitter of Niall Buggy as the only son, a pixilated and desperate man steeped in family lore who nonetheless bolted half a continent away. For him and his kin, heritage is a cruel joke masquerading as an oracle...
...then, does the exposure of Boggs, though so much less important, feel so much more plangent than the rejection of Tower? Perhaps because we place more faith in our athletic superstars, and expect more faithfulness in return. Heroism is famously a game of inches: get a little too close to a role model, catch him at the backstage entrance, and the loss can be desolating. Admiration is itself a form of suspended disbelief; turning a blind eye can be as much an act of forgiveness as turning the other cheek. We cannot afford to see our heroes at too close...