Word: smilingly
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Even through the grainy newsreels, we can see what the people at the time saw: the radiant smile, the eyes flashing with good humor, the cigarette holder held at a jaunty angle, the good-natured toss of the head, the buoyant optimism, the serene confidence with which he met economic catastrophe and international crisis...
...cake-bearing girls on the corner just past Guanabo's main drag and pick up a much older woman, 60 or so, who's been visiting her mother and needs to go just a little ways out of town. Ten minutes later--ĦAqui, Aqui!--she gets out. She smiles thank-you, and we smile goodbye--and again we're empty. We don't like to be empty. Through the Cuban countryside we feel ashamed to have the back seat unpeopled--all this room we have, all this fuel. It's getting dark, and as the roads go black, what...
...things that make the real-life Damon a star--his agreeable features, easy smile and whelpish energy--keep the audience glued to his side in The Talented Mr. Ripley despite the repulsive acts his character commits. His apple-pie qualities are essential to the moral disquiet Minghella strives to create in the audience. But they don't necessarily make Damon a good actor. If Damon has a demon, it is that he thinks the jury is still out on whether he can act. "Gwyneth [Paltrow] can walk into a scene and be talking about something else, and they say 'Action...
...look at Alain Delon (the delicate stud of Purple Noon) or Dennis Hopper (who gave Ripley a cowboy swagger in the 1977 The American Friend, Wim Wenders' adaptation of Ripley's Game) and see an actor sharpening his tools: the attentiveness, the useful smile, the waiting for a cue to make his move. Ripley watches Dickie, and an actor prepares. We watch the actor playing Ripley and learn the secrets of his duplicitous craft. It's as if a famous seducer had made a how-to video...
...suicide rate at holiday time: Christmas movies. Just when we need a little seasonal perk-up--some of the cheerful idiocy that Hollywood is happy to market 11 months a year--the studios send us films about depression, corruption and grim death (this year, including Mr. Death). Santa's smile gives way to the rattling of Marley's Ghost. And all because Dec. 31 is the deadline for Oscar nominations...