Word: puzzlements
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...Glass Menagerie, the guilty sustaining secret of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the menacing silences of Harold Pinter all brooded under the skin of Sam Shepard's naturalism. So the film version, which Shepard wrote and stars in, should be an event and not a puzzlement. In "opening up" the play, Robert Altman has dissipated some of its caged-animal tension and replaced it with torpid mannerisms. Eddie (Shepard) sucks all the existential meaning out of a toothpick; May (Kim Basinger) thumbs her full lips; the Old Man (Harry Dean Stanton), who has intruded on both their lives...
...America, his choice of a squalid, furtive life by a man who could have lived in princely admiration, his paranoia--he had the fillings in his teeth removed because if "somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking"--evoke pity and puzzlement...
...languid style (long, distancing Steadicam takes) and a group of good actors who resolutely refuse to take charge of their characters' destinies or the plot's point. Aside from a couple of energetic performances by Richard Dreyfuss and Daryl Hannah, the actors stand around doing exposition--or, alternatively, miming puzzlement. The largest offender in this regard is Danny Huston, who plays the lead, an investigative reporter turned private eye, and is loxlike in his lack of any emotion aside from Weltschmerz...
...conference call, comparing notes across a virtual war room. Bush confidante Karen Hughes in Texas said Kerry had come across as "lecturing," pointing his finger like a schoolmaster. In his Washington living room, Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, said Kerry's position on Iraq was a "puzzlement," a contradiction of his own votes. From suburban Maryland, White House communications director Dan Bartlett read an email an apolitical friend had sent him during the speech, saying he found Kerry's approach to terrorism unconvincing. From Boston, where Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie had set up a real...
...hush surrounding Midsummer has nothing to do with its performance at the box office, which has been solid, nor with audience reception, which appears to have been quite positive. It owes, rather, to a deep puzzlement on the part of theater critics and commentators over how to describe the effect of the show or characterize its very rare and very deep success. One local reviewer praised nearly all elements of the production, from the lighting to the comedy to the notorious flying fairies, before confessing his “complicated” and “profoundly ambivalent?...