Word: rueful
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...that curious slow-motion way he has, his body doing not the act itself but the slo-mo replay. The photographers click away. Dukakis, one thinks, may have made a mistake -- in his outfit, with his large head, he looks like Charlie Brown, and something in his almost rueful body English suggests that Lucy is about to snatch the ball away again just as he kicks. Unfair: a reporter remarks, "This is part of Dukakis' relentless search for a constituency shorter than himself." In a few moments it is over. The kids yell in little voices: "Two, four, six, eight...
...built around Sergeant Cribb, then echoed the early 20th century in the nostalgic Hollywood story Keystone and the brilliantly plotted thriller The False Inspector Dew. Here he returns to 19th century London and, as always, to a subtle but relentless dissection of Britain's unjust social-class system. The rueful, candid voice he gives to the fleshy prince rings true, the details of the horse-racing and music-hall worlds are vivid, and much of the tale is sweetly funny -- as when His Royal Highness, disguised to investigate a murder, is accosted by a streetwalker who addresses him amiably...
MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK by Saul Bellow. An eminent botanist is the hapless hero of the Nobel laureate's rueful, comic tale of love and money among the intellectuals...
RADIO DAYS Woody Allen recalls the power of a mass medium and a messy family in shaping a child's imagination. This memory play is also a rueful reflection on the ways time's passage both diminishes and enhances that power...
...even one juicy onstage death scene, and the mourners are limited to one wordless gesture and one choked cry. Although the play appears to celebrate the tender bonds of family and community, the beauty of human connection is all but unseen: real self-awareness comes in monologue or in rueful exchanges among the shades of characters already dead. In the climax, a young woman who has died in childbirth revisits earth on the day of her twelfth birthday, only to find that her mother cannot "see" her. That is, not only is the mother unable to envision the ghost...