Word: shrill
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...days all the tunnels and shafts had to be dug with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely...
...hammer. He obligingly did, talking meanwhile about how he hadn't found an opal in weeks. Then he asked me if I'd like to have a go. I took the air hammer and started ripping some sandstone off the wall. And then, suddenly, there was a shrill noise, somewhere between a crunch and a squeak. John dropped to his knees and started scrabbling with his hands at the cut I'd opened. Under the movie lights, to my astonishment, there was a brilliant green flash. I'd gone straight into a small seam of opal and fragmented...
Movies have had way too much fun with Italian-American stereotyping, but Lee plays it dead serious, unendurably shrill--and for an endless 2 hrs. 20 min. Still, we can't pin all the blame for ethnic defamation on Lee; his screenwriters are Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli. To them, we cry, like a stern Italian grandma, "Vergogna!" That's how you say "Shame on you" in Italian...
What scared me more, though, was listening to myself grow hysterical. I was convinced that most video and computer games were a waste. And besides, why wasn't he reading? As I grew more shrill, my son grew more sullen. I was rejecting something he loved. And he recognized my prejudice as uninformed. I was also violating a basic rule of parenting: take an interest in what your kid is doing--especially when his tastes diverge from yours. Every parent in America got a refresher course on that rule April...
...barring a debatable ending, Dream of Life actually does stick. Perhaps it's because the characters, Isa (Eloise Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier), don't ask anything of us, aren't playing to us. They're not even always likable: Isa's rough-and-readiness can quickly acquire a shrill, desperate edge, and Marie is generally painful to watch. The two live in an apartment Marie (somewhat unofficially) looks after; the owners all perished except for a comatose girl, whose diary captivates Isa. Both in their early 20s, both living hand to mouth, perpetually between jobs, they strike...