Word: shrug
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...easy to shrug off statistics and authority figures that constantly remind us why we should not drink. At times, it seems as we are listening to a broken record of statistics that no longer make us think about our actions. However, it is not as easy to shrug off the impact of these figures, when they involve someone we know. We may not ever have met Joseph A. Bettinger, but it is harder to dismiss his name than it is a number...
...middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes...
This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage. You gain from their work--and from a wonderfully real cast that includes Woody Harrelson--a very powerful impression of a population trying to maintain the small comforts of quotidian routines, common civility, as the only available defense against the surrounding anarchy. And you begin to see the goodness of Henderson's deed not as a carefully considered moral...
Tell most people that their health will suffer if they don't get their blood pressure down, and they respond with a shrug. But tell them their sex life will suffer? That gets their attention. In some men, blood-pressure drugs may lead to difficulty achieving erection and ejaculation, but few hypertensive women complain about sexual problems. According to a study by Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown, N.Y., however, women with hypertension had a harder time achieving adequate vaginal lubrication and orgasm than women with normal blood pressure. Curiously, this was the case regardless of whether the hypertensive women took medication...
...near-obsessive concentration on internal thoughts and consciousness guarantee an uphill battle in achieving upper-end-mainstream/borderline elite moviegoer appeal. Softley and screen-writer Hossein Amini have succeeded in crafting an intensely physical adaptation that takes enough sweeping liberties and simplifications to make James scholars cringe or shrug, but retains sufficient subtlety and sensitivity to be dramatically compelling...