Word: solemnness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This observation is more or less true as well for two of this summer's potential movie blockbusters: Men in Black, an inventive action-comedy loosely based on lore about mysterious dark-suited agents who harass people who've seen UFOs; and the more solemn Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel and said to be, in the words of its director Bob Zemeckis, the rare alien movie "rooted in true scientific believability." "We've done more for them than they do for us," says Price of Hollywood. A handsome, weather-beaten man with surprisingly still, pale blue eyes...
...worked. Pocahontas had soaring melodies to match its do-gooding intentions; The Hunchback of Notre Dame came within two deaths and three cute gargoyles of being the first grownup singing-cartoon romantic tragedy. But these two movies also had an almost toxic serioso content. At times they got so solemn they could have been Broadway musicals in the fashionable I'm-miserable-I'm-a- monster-I'm-a-Times-Square-whore-my-ship-is-sinking mode. Songs for suicides...
...work. The debaters deliver their arguments with conviction and fluency, and the director attempts to break up the essential monotony of a dialectic discussion through physical movement and some pleasant comic touches: Mendoza's four brigands become four devils, horns and all, who periodically cross the stage with admirably solemn expressions, replenishing drinks and once bearing a crucifix that is passed around like a specimen "on view...
Summing up my feelings a few years ago, I said, "Gradually the College came to seem challenging rather than intimidating, mind-stretching rather than soul-numbing, an intellectual carnival rather than a solemn observance of eternal truths." I add--and would be surprised if my classmates did not agree--that the Harvard experience became a way of seeing, a way of thinking, a way of feeling, that would somehow touch and shape almost everything we would do thereafter...
That includes kicking, as in butt. She does that literally in Linklater's Dazed and Confused, as the high school senior for whom terrorizing freshman girls is both a solemn duty and a fashion statement. She can also be tough on men. In Sleep with Me she warns a guy, "I hope you don't think you're going to sleep with me"; two minutes later she's mounting him with lithe expertise. If her women are softer in the three new films, all have a nervy self-assurance; they seem convinced not that they will be stars but that...