Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clearly or charmingly than when they encounter the second flavor of verb, the quirky irregulars. The past tense of spring is sprang, but the past of cling is not clang but clung, and the past of bring is neither brang nor brung but brought. English has 180 irregulars, a ragtag list that kids simply must memorize...
...woman. Here, a girl becomes a man. Mulan is the only child of a dutiful man tied to tradition. "I know my place," he tells his rebellious tomboy of a daughter. "It is time you learned yours." Her place, it turns out, is at the head of a ragtag platoon fighting Shan-Yu's Huns. This woman warrior will prove that the art of war is the smart of war, that one wins by cunning, not strength. And unlike most Disney heroines, she achieves her goal without much mentoring. As her sidekick, a spindly dragon named Mushu, proudly says...
Strange? Certainly, but not in the same alienating manner that disturbed many viewers of Fargo. The lighthearted Big Lebowski dotes upon its ragtag hero and has a generous heart behind the veneer of its lowlife comic weirdness...
...scientific team assembled by writers Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio, adapting an old Michael Crichton novel, is ragtag and cranky. The chief credential of its psychologist (Dustin Hoffman) is a report on how to handle alien encounters, which he admits cribbing largely from sci-fi tales. The biochemist (Sharon Stone) is a pill popper. The mathematician (Samuel L. Jackson) is a cynic, the astrophysicist (Liev Schreiber) is twittily lusting after a Nobel Prize, and the team leader (Peter Coyote) needs to try a little tenderness. In short, the possibilities for amusing dysfunction are potentially larger than we usually find...
...series isn't appreciably better than the movie after which no sequels need have been made, and necessarily worse. The sensibility that led to making the ordinary world-running-down feel of a ship maintaining its emergency lighting and water is missing. Who wants to see a bunch of ragtag ruffians conducting a Goonies-like escape through a creepy funhouse ship, or to witness the most beautiful and horrific outer space being Salad-Shot through a window? O, fair alien, we hardly knew...