Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...manner as she recounts such imponderables is graceful and funny. It is also ladylike: she never entangles former companions in rueful confessions. She tells of an unsatisfactory long affair with a well-known director, and although there must be 25,000 people in show business who know his name, she gives him a discreet pseudonym (Robin, for Robin Hood, because of his left-wing politics). She has a good eye for the bizarre and plenty of material to use it on, including a strange dinner date with Henry Kissinger and several Secret Service agents. She spent a good part...
...traditionally valued are masculine ones: energy, efficiency, power, animus, each melodramatic plot resolved with a sock to the jaw. From French films one has come to expect delicacy, grace, comradely tenderness, a ruminative intelligence. Their directors seem to inhabit an exalted sorority where girlish high spirits, sage whispers and rueful endearments reverberate in the hallways. So leave it to French Film Maker Diane Kurys to devise, in Entre Nous, a bittersweet domestic epic that reconciles feminism with femininity...
...prove an embarrassment, as when one avid matron removes her brassiere and Gowan offers this verbal foreplay: "Released from their support, her breasts drooped like hanged men." And for ages now he has been unable to put words into an order that would constitute a publishable poem. As his rueful ex-wife notes, "Gowan always maintained that what he hated most about writing was the paperwork." So from campus to campus he goes, supporting himself on charm, Celtic invective and waiters' tips stolen from restaurant tables...
Anyone capable of such a misperception might also pardonably take Simon for the best musical litigator in the business. Hearts and Bones (Warner Bros.), an album of old and lost love, shattered dreams and delicate possibilities, is rueful, mature, self-mocking and hauntingly melodic in a way that is supposed to get rock in trouble: too far from the street, too close to the stage...
...classic recollection of liberalism carried to the point of tyranny. Perhaps in her reading, Ruth Hale ran across another observation by Oscar Wilde: "Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." This is one of those rare and rueful times...