Word: stolid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...getting a plethora of iambic pentameter. Last Christmas saw a stolid Othello (with Branagh and Laurence Fishburne) and the brutal, enthralling Richard III (Ian McKellen). This week three Shakespeare films will be on view: Romeo and Juliet, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard and the British Twelfth Night, or What You Will, directed by Trevor Nunn, the former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director who has been named boss of the Royal National Theatre. Branagh has his four-hour Hamlet ready for Christmas. Filmmakers are trying every tactic--cultural intimidation, lavish spectacle, frenzied camerabatics and the casting of young stars...
...contest on the fate of democratic reform into a two-man race with his main challenger, Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov. After weeks of extraordinary, exuberant stumping and an unprecedented media blitz, Yeltsin the populist politician has been reborn, while some of the gas has gone out of the stolid Zyuganov's gloom-and-doom campaign. With nine other candidates in the race, neither of the front runners is expected to win outright--50% plus one--in the first round, but there is little doubt that they will face each other in a runoff in July...
...were not included in the list of nominations: Tom Hanks and John Travolta. Early on, many people seemed to be expecting a repeat of the "Forrest Gump" - "Pulp Fiction" race of last year. But, I have to say, I'm happy that neither one was nominated. Hanks gave a stolid performance, unexciting and annoyingly self-righteous, as usual. Travolta was amusing in "Get Shorty" but his role gave him nothing to do; he was much better in "Pulp Fiction." An actor, however, who really should have been nominated is Jonathan Pryce, for his stellar performance as the eccentric Lytton Strachey...
...fierce energy of passive aggression drives--and explains--adolescence; in its grandiose moments it pulverizes empires. In the Soviet Union hundreds of millions of passive aggressives created a vast, vodka-soaked culture of subversive inefficiency, sly refusal and covert nonproduction that ultimately brought down the stolid slab of Marxism-Leninism...
...American popular culture and with contained excess. He's looking, I suppose, for that distinctive element in American vulgarity that isn't vulgar-and hopes, I think, to create in Loker Commons an architecture that avoids either kitsch or Harvard-Square-trendy good taste. The space has an almost stolid we've-been-here-forever loft-like feel to it, with honest gray columns and a ceiling that have survived since a renovation close to a hundred years ago, and a profusion of robust oak benches and match boarding. This is plain living; here to stay...