Word: soft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop...
TRACY CHAPMAN: CROSSROADS (Elektra). The follow-up to her smash debut album in 1988 is . . . well, just like the first. Chapman's voice stays strong, her music soft, her message angry and often oppressively earnest. Straightforward and worthy but generally without excitement...
Junior John Weisbrod added a second goal on an assist from classmate Mike Vukonich at the 11:24 mark. The player with the superstrong slapshot sent a surprisingly soft slider through the middle that slipped through a pair of Yalies to Weisbrod's waiting stick...
Despite its customized carpeting of a soft-rock score, Immediate Family isn't exactly sentimental. It's a fond diagnosis of sentiment, which director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel, The Accused) observes with his usual handsome care. Close and Woods, more familiar playing high-powered candidates for psychosis, are laser-precise as the Spectors. They work hard at appearing comfortable in roles without edges. But the Spectors, who set the film's agenda, cede sympathy to Lucy, as the well-to-do in movies inevitably do to the poor-but-spunky...
...picture goes soft -- say, from the rigorous humanism of The Elephant Man to the emotional sops of Life Goes On. But that is no crucial flaw in what is at heart a love story written in pain. As Christy's parents, Brenda Fricker and Ray McAnally are flinty, unrouged, splendid. And Daniel Day-Lewis' triumph is nearly as spectacular as Christy's: to reveal the blind fury in his eyes and stunted gestures, to play him with a streak of fierce, black-Irish humor. Brilliantly, Day-Lewis shows a mind, and then a man, exploding from the slag heap...