Word: plangently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...Claude Lelouch synthesized every foreigner's view of French love with A Man and a Woman, the Paris-to-Deauville erotic express in which the plangent hearts of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee beat to an inane, unforgettable score. The picture was a worldwide hit, won a couple of Oscars and provided upscale young couples with an excuse to drive fast and twirl rapturously on the beach. Now Lelouch has reunited his stars for A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later. Aimee, whose features have calcified chicly, is a movie producer desperate to make a musical version...
That kind of plangent wistfulness is hardly confined to Mother's account of her honeymoon or Grandpa's homesickness for his youth. The tug and ache of nostalgia pull even at the hardiest of travelers. The caustic Evelyn Waugh introduces his collection of travel essays, When the Going Was Good, with a heartbroken valedictory to a vanished Golden Age of travel that is, in effect, a valentine to his own lost youth. In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore...
Patsy Cline's voice was a wondrous instrument, a plangent contralto aged in whisky and barroom cigarette smoke, with the traditional hillbilly yodel transformed into the gasp of a mature heart breaking. All evidence suggests she earned that voice. In her marriage to Charlie, she shows that she can stand by her man, stand up to him, then throw him out when he gets too rough. Curing the on-the-road blues with a little a cappella harmony on Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms, Patsy finds therapy in music: a way both of transcending her troubles...