Word: plangent
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These are the candid, plangent voices of Israel's soldiers, angry reservists confronting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir last week in a makeshift encampment outside Nablus, the largest and most turbulent Arab city on the occupied West Bank. Nothing since the 1982 war in Lebanon has eaten into the heart of Israel's most revered institution, the Israel Defense Forces, as the past 14 months of bitter war against children and stones has done. Seemingly impervious to Israel's iron fist, the Palestinian uprising rages on, and that is exacting a price from the I.D.F. measured less in injuries than...
Midway through Chekhov's last play, written as he was dying, a plangent twang is heard by the members and hangers-on of a once grand family on the verge of eviction from its estate. Everybody perceives the sound, which Chekhov likens in the stage directions to a snapping string, but each has his own sense of what it meant. To one, it suggests the call of a heron; to another, an owl; and to a third, a cable breaking in a distant mine shaft. In most productions the moment is a throwaway. In a few it hints...
...exotic features and bossa-nova ballads into a boffo LP. Anita Baker poured the ache of jazz into pop and sold a couple million copies of Rapture. All over the dial, female singers are anchoring distinctive personalities to the sound of soul on silk. But none have hit the plangent chord struck by John and Cissy Houston's little girl...
...might therefore join De Palma and Screenwriter David Mamet in a prayer that their epic work -- a masterpiece of idiomatic American moviemaking as well as a plangent commentary on its traditions -- will be spared from the literalists, complaining both that the gore is too real and that the characters are not real enough. Protect them as well from the wrath of the traditionalists, who resist the intrusion of originality on their passion for the endless restatement of stale generic conventions. Deliver them instead to the audience that will be galvanized, as the filmmakers were, by the chance to reimagine...
...though not really much of a talent, for robbing convenience stores. He loves his wife Edwina (Holly Hunter), a police officer he met on his frequent vacations at the local prison. And he shares her desire to create little baby His and Eds. Says Hi, in the daft and plangent narration that sets the tone for this terrific comedy: "Every day we kept a child out of the world was a day he might later regret having missed...