Word: rote
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...seriously, is a corrosive challenge to Christianity. But having made the bold decision to film the novel, Howard hasn't the energy to slap the thing to life. He's like a guide on one of the countless Da Vinci Code tours of Paris or London, doing it by rote, letting the film hobble to its climax with still more exposition. Good movies are show-and-tell; this one is all-tell, no-show...
...seems propelled more out of duty than love for the project. He drags along the audience (who, if they read the book, have an emotional investment in the story) as if he were a guide who's led this tour for years and is doing it by rote. For them it might be a passion; for him, it's just a job. Hanks, too, seems to sleepwalk through the part; he gives it the fretful stare that spoke tragic volumes in Philadelphia and Saving Private Ryan but just registers as numb here. The villains fare a bit better. Bettany gets...
...stands nervously in front of a lectern, adopting the rote singsong of a 13-year-old giving her Bat Mitzvah speech. She thanks the rabbi and the relatives who came from Florida, Australia and "all the way from Century Village." She praises a Jewish upbringing that on holidays "gave me the opportunity to dress like a doily and sit in the corner in silent anger while the rest of my family discusses in a whisper whether or not I'm a lesbian." Rebecca Drysdale, it so happens, is gay (and does a nifty Dr. Seuss parody about how the butch...
...teacher must feel confident in the subject to veer from the rote learning that turns so many students off. At Frick Middle School in Oakland, Calif., science teacher Caleb Cheung turned seventh-graders into inquisitive crime-scene investigators when he introduced a unit last fall on cells and microscopes. Students arrived in class to find an empty birdcage and a ransom note--someone had apparently kidnapped Cheung's pet doves, Herbert and Angel. For the next six weeks, the young detectives analyzed fingerprints, interviewed witnesses and compared hair and fabric samples under microscopes to find the perpetrator...
...action takes place without the athlete's even being aware that it's occurring. After years of practice, hitting a baseball or shooting a basket becomes almost second nature to a professional athlete. So it's easy to think the skill resides in muscle memory. But even those rote actions involve a tremendous amount of mental processing; they are just happening too fast for the athlete to realize they are going on. "It's not the conscious kind of processing, the kind where you're thinking about how to control your body," says Jeff Simons, a sports psychologist at California...