Word: statically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Street Kings (an oddly static and generic title for a movie that seethes with deranged energy) comes from Southern California's dark romancer of violent cops, James Ellroy - or, as he calls himself, the "king of American crime fiction." Unlike L.A. Confidential and Black Dahlia, this movie isn't based on an Ellroy novel. It comes from an original script of Ellroy's that two lesser scribes worked over. But under David Ayer's direction it's still got Ellroy's arrhythmic pulse, careering from one high-caliber confrontation to another. The movie is in love with the boys...
...Like fellow postwar stars Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, he'd tense his neck muscles and speak in a sonorous growl that brought authority and menace to his speeches; he could make piety sound robust. But where Lancaster and Douglas were kinetic, bursting with restlessness, Heston was essentially static - not so much statuesque as a statue in some audio-animatronic hall of Heroes. He stood and he spoke. That's why screenwriters loved him as much as movie audiences did. He was a hero to them...
...direction fully complements the strength of their cast. The play is excellently paced, with varying moments of noisy dissension, tense silence, and light humor. They make very good use of the space in the Ex, ensuring that the uninteresting picture of 12 jurors seated around a table rarely remains static for long. The set starts out as an orderly room, yellow walls lit by the sidelights streaming through stage windows, with a table and chairs neatly in the center. By the end of the play, however, the lights have dimmed, the chairs are in disarray, and a switchblade is left...
...double martinis, pretty much died out with Nick and Nora Charles 60 years ago. Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the crime caper with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, is about as close as you could come lately, and they kept trying to kill each other. Maybe wedded happiness is considered static, undramatic, a minuet of compromises. It could also be that depicting the satisfaction of people over 30 just doesn't appeal to the audience demographic; the young may think that anyone who's settled for living with someone else is either miserable or deserves to be. Whatever the reason, connubial bliss...
...some groups, their relatively steady number of adherents over the years hides a remarkable amount of coming and going. Simply counting Catholics since 1972, for example, you would get the impression that its population had remained fairly static - at about 25% of adult Americans (the current number is 23.9%). But the Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists...