Word: stiff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...team faces stiff competition from all sides, but Ivy rival Yale will be the toughest test for Harvard...
This slap-stick atmosphere, however, proves incompatible when the film chooses to shift gears, focusing on the serious problems of divorce. While Sally Field is largely convincing as a somewhat frustrated, struggling career woman, the "real-life" interactions between Daniel and Miranda seem stiff and unrealistic. And no tangible rapport is established between Daniel and his beloved children--they may profess to love him, but all seem equally fond of thehandsome, stereotypical yuppie Stu, a purposelyone-dimensional character. The relationshipbetween Daniel/Mrs. Doubtfire and Stu seems overlystrained given that Daniel's main motivation forthe charade is to see his kids...
...film critics have called it Kurosawa's "fifth witness." In a justifiably famous sequence, the camera follows the woodcutter into the forest, traveling behind him, then in front of him, around him, below him when he crosses a footbridge, until at last we see the dead man's arms stiff from rigor mortis. It is a dazzling tour de force, the kind of sequence that sends film school students into raptures...
Critics consider that to be throwing good money after bad. The proposal to revitalize Eisenhuttenstadt has run into stiff opposition from the western German steel industry, the European Commission in Brussels, and E.C. countries, which must unanimously approve new state subsidies -- at a time when Europe's steel industry as a whole is awash in excess capacity and red ink. Italy wants to salvage 2,000 of 5,800 imperiled jobs at Taranto, in the impoverished Mezzogiorno, while Spain is struggling to cushion the blow in the politically troubled Basque region, where 9,700 steelworkers are targeted for dismissal...
Howard, although occasionally stiff, performs the even more difficult task of creating the modern-classical tension in the play. By playing Polyxena as a classical character with modern-day worries and emotions, Howard forms the believable bridge which makes the play so interesting...