Word: sullens
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Despite Hoffman's wonderfully gruff, implosive star performance -- he is so in tune with Dutch's desperation that even his murderous rages are sullen -- this is at heart a movie about the power of a beautiful, fearless woman. In Kidman, an improbable amalgam of Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith, Benton found Drew's embodiment. Toward the end, when she flies out of two men's lives, she seems an airborne goddess of artful deceit...
...Sant adores characters who are literally too sensitive for words. This recommends his work to the serious younger audience, which tends to mime its discontents by striking sullen poses. But it is not a useful attribute for a maker of sound movies. Neither is Van Sant's disdain for narrative. He got away with Drugstore Cowboy because its band of drugged-out dodoes were engaged in a petty crime spree that almost passed for a plot. But My Own Private Idaho is a different story. Or rather nonstory, in which a pair of homosexual hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves...
Melville's remarkable talent for evocative one-line descriptions is the saving grace of these sketches. For example, in "I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People," the sullen vice president is described as having "the gravitational density of an imploding star." The same story also presents the reader with a memorable image from Guyana at dusk: "a host of bats sewed up the great opal and silver clouds with their flitting, looping trajectories...
...President's May 15 selection of Edith Cresson as Prime Minister, to shake the nation out of its sullen mood, soured after little more than a month. With only a 38% public-approval rating, the bride of high office may be headed for divorce at a point when she has barely assembled her trousseau. French unemployment has reached 9.5%, and the record number of jobless looks as if it will go higher still. Meanwhile immigrant riots broke out in June, even as municipal policemen went on strike -- along with air-traffic controllers, railway workers and doctors...
...social debate that pits the virtues of ethnic and racial diversity against the value of a common national identity. Of course, unlike the artificial construct that is Yugoslavia, America evolved organically, its identity forged by a populace that for the most part joined the union eagerly, not with sullen resistance. Still, it was instructive for Americans to watch the television footage from Yugoslavia to see what unbounded "multiculturalism" can look like. Had Americans spent the past two centuries as the Yugoslavs have, stoking ethnic antagonisms rather than trying to forge shared values, last week's Fourth of July celebration might...