Word: stolidness
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...these films neatly bisected the mood of this year?s electorate. Moore?s documentary was angry, skeptical, wide-ranging, skipping from topic to topic, using comedy and sarcasm to convey moral rage; its hero was a grungy fat guy who ambushed his adversaries. Mel Gibson?s docudrama was stolid, bloody, humorless, remorseless, sticking to its micro-subject with macro implications, staying obsessively on point; its hero was a stern thin man who endured scourging and calumny in order to fulfill His mission. In other words, Moore embodied what the Right saw as Kerry?s base; Jesus incarnated what the Right...
Part of the problem may be the American cast, headed by the stolid, uncharismatic James Naughton as Brandt and by Richard Thomas, too transparently fake and obsequious as Güillaume. But Frayn hasn't done his part to turn this political drama into an involving personal one. We never understand why Brandt, who scorns Güillaume at the outset, is won over by him, and thus we don't fully register the human tragedy of his betrayal. Even that treachery seems kind of piddly. Maybe the cold war is already too distant for us to appreciate why Güillaume...
...also static. French critic Michel Ciment called Ghost 2 "animation without animation"--a cartoon in which the images don't move much. On stolid figures and faces, only the mouths move, as in the old Clutch Cargo TV series. The action scenes don't move at a clip either. Sometimes Oshii preens a little, as when the camera tracks slowly around an object. It points out what's missing in his approach: fluidity of character line, the subtlety of expression that brought humanity to a Warner Bros. cartoon duck or rabbit...
...vast majority of Harvard College’s Class of 2004, longtime childhood hopes of playing professional baseball have long since been replaced by aspirations for the stolid world of grad school, investment banking and adulthood...
Colgan acknowledges Massino's stolid charisma, his use of power as an instrument of fear. "If Joey said something, people jumped. They wanted to be endeared to Joey," he says. "If they didn't do what he said, he'd whack them. And if he even thought you were an informant, he'd have you killed." Colgan managed to persuade Ray Wean--a Bonanno man so huge that when Colgan once arrested him, he couldn't get the cuffs around Wean's thick wrists--to be an undercover informant and later testify for the prosecution at Massino's '87 trial...