Word: soft
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...gone. As the curtain rises on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic; 759 pages), all Harry's parents and parent-figures - Sirius and Dumbledore - are dead. He's quit school, and he's got a job to do, picking up the shards of Voldemort's shattered soul. Any soft adult buffer between him and the world has been stripped away. He's riding the rims. Harry isn't having a good time anymore...
...That judgment applies particularly to Bardem's performance as the loathsome Lorenzo. In the beginning, as he volunteers to lead the newly revived Inquisition, he is all soft-voiced reason. He is polite to the point of obsequiousness, not only to his church superiors, but even to the people he torments. Creepy, well-met and utterly corrupt, and when the French invade he simply disappears - only to reappear later as, of all things, a Voltairian rationalist, married, with children, and growing rich as an enforcer for Spain's occupiers. He is, in his way, also a perfect modernist, blowing blandly...
...held that as the Olympics drew closer, conditions would ease for dissidents as Beijing tried to show its best face to the world. But with a year to go before the Games, China's Communist leaders have shown no intention of easing up. "It's a policy of 'soft to the outside, strict within,'" Hu Jia told TIME. He warned, too, that once the Olympics were over, things would really get bad for activists. "I have already been warned by a policeman. He said, 'You are very lively right now aren't you? Just wait. There'll be a settling...
...establish itself as a great power, to gain the respect of its international peers," she says. The country's new confidence is founded on its oil and gas reserves, which it has used for political leverage. "There's been a lot of pressure on governments to go soft on Russia because it's seen as an important new economic player," says Denis MacShane, Britain's Europe Minister from 2002-05. And Western governments have wanted Russia's cooperation on everything from combating terrorism to tackling such tricky international negotiations as the future of Iran's nuclear program. Earlier this month...
...boom, Two of a Kind bust; Staying Alive a zig, Perfect a zag. The sassy-baby Look Who's Talking was his top grosser since Grease; then he had another recession until Pulp Fiction pegged him as the cool bad guy and won him a string of hits. Another soft phase set in until this year's comedy smash Wild Hogs...