Word: stridently
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These Spring Break trips must hold a special place in the hearts of Harvard students. It’s the opportunity to travel to a foreign locale, thus eliminating America’s strident underage drinking laws and enabling students to wreak havoc on their livers as they have never done before. There are bright-eyed high school senior girls (think of all the romance that is Pre-Frosh Weekend—for an entire week! and in bikinis!) for the guys, and older men staking out the beaches and hoping to play the role of temporary Sugar Daddy...
...Will Rokos' plot make the film seem like a bizarre sitcom pilot (racist guy with a black lady friend saddles his racist dad with a black roommate). But the cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story...
Chinese and Filipina women come to the U.S. territory of Saipan to pursue the American dream. They sew clothes labeled "Made in the USA." But they work in sweatshops for measly pay and are forbidden to strike or get pregnant, says Tia Lessin's strident but revelatory documentary about wage slavery, American-style...
Just as there are two types of families, sad and happy ones, there are two types of radio talk shows, strident and chatty ones. The Satellite Sisters belong in the latter category in both instances. Five sisters (Julie, 46, Liz, 44, Sheila, 43, Monica, 42, and Lian, 36), or half the entire Dolan family, they can be heard cheerfully chewing the fat every week on public radio...
...generate a kind of dignity, a classy presence that lends the opening stages of the film some elegance. DeVito clashes with this atmosphere and ruins it. He plays a major role in the ending, when the film takes a sudden and unwelcome turn for the brutal. His strident, shrill presence does nothing to make the film more watchable. Mamet clearly intended this to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller that keeps you guessing. But he piled on about three plot twists too many, and when he does get to something of a surprise conclusion, everybody has stopped caring...