Word: poignantly
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...Johnny Cash than the Klaxons. Current single Daddy's Gone is a stark rebuke from son to absentee father: "I won't be the lonely one/ Sitting on my own and sad/ A 50-year-old reminiscing what I had." The schoolyard taunt is made all the more poignant by harmonies soaring free from a Ronettes-style melody...
...note that while beautiful, riveting and poignant might be applied to many TIFF graduates that went on to Oscar renown, the word blockbuster would not. As action films, guy-to-guy comedies and digitally animated features increasingly pull in the giant grosses, the high-to-middle-brow drama - TIFF's specialty - has become if not an endangered species, then certainly a niche item in Hollywood. None of the aforementioned pictures earned as much as $100 million at the North American box office. A megahit like The Dark Knight can grab that in a weekend. Only Brokeback Mountain took in more...
There's nothing remarkable, or witty, or particularly engaging about Hamlet 2, a ragged comedy about a failed actor who tries to mount a science-fiction musical sequel to Shakespeare's tragedy in a Tucson, Ariz., high school. But at the movie's damp little heart there is a poignant truth: all actors' desperate neediness to win the appreciation and approval of the audience, which is anyone they meet. All of life is a war for that attention, in which the armaments are charm, beauty and menace, the battle cry is "Look at me!" and the secret weapon...
...delicate. But potent." It's November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector. He's loaded the carousel with his family pictures, a poignant gesture because of what we know about him: not only does he cheat on his wife--prolifically--but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier...
Wood cites this anecdote--and, in a bravura display, four others that are just as poignant--in support of a technical point he's making about free indirect discourse and characterization. The funny thing about it is that even if you don't understand what he's talking about, the anecdotes still slay you. In other words, you don't have to know what free indirect discourse is to read it, because you already know how to read it. Which raises the question: Do we really need to know How Fiction Works...