Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...better days unfolding. Progress was the indispensable mechanism and metaphysic of the American idea: the pioneer progression westward over space corresponded with the steady upward incline of opportunity over time. "You can't stop progress," Americans would tell one another with an air of dazzled exuberance or a rueful sigh. The future was bearing down on the land like a grinning child at the wheel of something roaring, gaudily bright and faintly dangerous...
...never ate a bug that big before," says I the old gunfighter (Steve McQueen), faced down by a lobster at a cattlemen's banquet in a raw Wyoming town. His voice is soft, whisky-warm and a bit rueful; he knows that in 1901 his day is over, that he is out of place among the boost ers and dealers who have built the town and fenced the range. They have brought him here to wipe out a gang of rustlers, but his murderous skills and cranky in dependence make the clean-shirt-once-a-week crowd nervous. Before...
...precisely this Chekhovian quality -the rueful romanticism, the generous fatalism, the belief that everyone has his reasons-that permeates the best "approved" Soviet films, and perhaps the spirit of the men and women who make them as well. In the Soviet system, everyone has his function. Some people make films (about 150 features a year from the three major and 20 regional studios). Some people "edit" them (there are often three censors assigned to a production). Some people exhibit them (though theater managers, who have admissions quotas to meet, frequently pair Soviet films with livelier fare from abroad). And some...
...Albert warns himself about Keats' "egotistical sublime." His rich interior is forever ababble with Kant and Schopenhauer and his own obsessive, bewildered mutterings. A distant descendant of Leopold Bloom, cousin to the anguished intellectual comics of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and even Woody Allen, Albert negotiates a shambling, rueful passage through his mid-40s. He has made Who's Who in America (a New York magazine writer and editor), but "lately he has the feeling that he is not so much pursuing his destiny as furiously racing alongside it, the way cars race trains in old movies...
...that shames the plot's cliches. Casey uses the songs to suggest contradictions in Lil's character that the script brushes over. In the biting "Sailor's Tango"--sung to convert Bill-the evangelist smolders with sexual invitation. She turns the haunting denunciation of love into its tender yet rueful opposite--a declaration of her feelings for Bill in "Surabaya Johnny...