Word: primness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over the decades, French films have meant different things to the American audience. For a long time they were ooh-la-la, saucier, more worldly than their robust but prim Hollywood counterparts. Then, when movies became films, they were the heart (François Truffaut) and the brains (Jean-Luc Godard) of international cinema in its glory days. Then there were the boulevard comedies, like La Cage aux Folles and Three Men and a Baby, that got remade by Hollywood. After that they retreated into austerity, into the perfunctory embrace of minimalism. And now... well, frankly, now French films...
...That was one of the few times when Allyson's prim allure as a movie wife was questioned. (The Shrike, 10 years later, was the other big critique.) Mostly, her job was to talk sense into her men. Football star Peter Lawford, say, in Good News - she wanted him to hit the books so he'd be eligible to win the big game. Her only severe competition came not from the script but on the screen. Her sweetness might get upstaged by a flashier femme, as she was by Joan McCracken in Good News. Sometimes Allyson lost to a rival...
...Young Alice, a rambunctious tomboy, considered herself "the outsider in the nursery" and often clashed with her prim stepmother and competed with the rest of the children for her father's attention. "T.R. loved his daughter when he noticed she was there," says Stacy Cordery, a historian at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Ill., who is writing a biography of Alice with the cooperation of Alice's granddaughter Joanna Sturm...
...rebuke, which has stoked vigorous debate among the show's Net-savvy fans. Some speculate that the authorities worried that voting for TV contestants would make the Chinese want to vote in other contexts, such as for their political leaders. Others thought Li and her fellow finalists were insufficiently prim role models. It's also possible that Super Girl--produced by a station in Hunan province--was upstaging CCTV, China's national network, which produces its own more subdued but far less popular ersatz Idol...
There are only two males in the packed bus—three if you include the driver, four if you include Vin Diesel on the tiny TV screens. For the most part, the girls on the bus are conservatively dressed, hair prim and shoulder-length or tied up in ponytails. The accessories of choice are gossip rags, shopping bags, and Starbucks cups. The girls in the very back giggle over the child actors in the “The Pacifier.” Other riders chat softly or fiddle with their iPods. The scene could be mistaken for a ride...