Word: staid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They meet morose. Davis (Steve Martin) is an architect unappreciated by his firm and by a staid girlfriend (Dana Delany). He has built the latter a house in their hometown that suits his dreams but not hers. Gwen (Goldie Hawn) is a waitress of dubious but, as she tells it, colorful background. In the course of a one-night stand she learns of the house, standing as empty as her life, and decides to fill up both...
...BOTTOM LINE: The staid European cinema comes alive with an epic as big and mysterious as the Continent...
Anyway, it stinks of calculation. The film -- about a Reno singer (Whoopi Goldberg) finding refuge from her gangster lover (Harvey Keitel) in a dilapidated convent run by staid Maggie Smith -- allows no room for irony, vagrant inspiration or air. There's something piquant about the look of Whoopi in a wimple, but the star must soar or sink with the vehicle, and this one is a bathysphere. Despite a nice turn by Kathy Najimy as a criminally chirpy nun and some inventive charts by ace arranger Marc Shaiman, Sister Act has corporate fingerprints smudging its smiling face...
...STAID NEW ENGLAND IS NOT KNOWN as a hotbed of evangelism. Yet it has sprouted one of the world's fastest-growing and most innovative bands of Bible - thumpers. Launched in 1979 by a young evangelist named Kip McKean, the Boston Church of Christ has grown from a 30-member community into a global empire of 103 congregations from California to Cairo with total Sunday attendance...
...GIVES NOTHING AWAY TO REVEAL that near the end of Alice McDermott's lyrical novel At Weddings and Wakes, there is a joyous wedding celebration. The bride, an aging ex-nun, allows herself to be swirled by her staid groom, a mailman who unexpectedly proves a sure-footed dancer. Even Momma, the embittered matriarch of the Irish-American Towne clan, permits herself a few sentimental tears. But when the party ends, Momma reminds the Roman Catholic celebrators that they have been "dancing on graves." Four days later, there will be a fresh grave to dig -- that of May, the autumn...