Word: plodders
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...subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson's gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today's moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN...
...cast is mostly excellent, with Crystal a nice surprise as the gravedigger and Richard Briers rescuing Polonius from amiable fuddery; this old man is as much plotter as plodder. If there's a lapse, it's in the central performance. Spuming his lines with catarrhal intakes of breath punctuating the bolts of rhetoric, Branagh is a whiz at making the poetry colloquial and intelligible; he spits out the 400-year-old verse like a rapmaster. But he can't so easily make it poetic...
...efficient in judging its players across the years. There?s usually no need to look beyond the weight of runs scored and wickets taken to assess a player?s proper place in the cricketing pantheon. But averages speak of substance rather than style. A talented showman and a dour plodder can be mediocrities on the numbers grid, although the first might have soared as often as he flopped, while the second never got off the ground. David Hookes, who died on Jan. 19, was not a cricket legend on traditional measures. After all, Hookes played 23 Tests, scored...
...Arroyo revels in the details of the job, describing herself as "a plodder, not a highflyer." Her staff have come to expect her customary late-night phone calls demanding updates on even the most picayune government projects: bridge repairs, toilet construction, the delivery of a bulldozer. After one year in office, she says, "by and large, I'm on track." Yet Arroyo, like the Philippines at the moment, is fluttering in an uncertain sky, trying to set a course but too often buffeted by forces that appear far more powerful than she. Poverty reigns, and government programs are hampered...
Arafat is a civil engineer by training, and he sees himself as more of a plodder than a brinksman. He will tell you about his long march, starting in '48 salvaging World War II rifles in the Egyptian desert. Yet the allure of a knockout punch has always proved his undoing. He envies the F.L.N. triumph over the French in Algeria, Khomeini's thundering revolution in Iran. His Palestine Liberation Organization gambits to become the de facto leader in Jordan and later in Lebanon dragged both countries into civil war. In the Gulf War, he bet on Saddam. This...