Word: taciturn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chamber of Trials. Dewy with sweat, she collapses into the arms of a burly guardian, exalting breathily: “I’ve done it! I’ve become a summoner!” Sadly, the heroes of Final Fantasy seem to grow more androgynous, be they taciturn, long-lashed fighters or spunky, spikey-haired pickpockets. Role-playing games have a girl-friendly reputation, so it helps to have characters both genders can identify with. (Heaven forbid, of course, a female lead.) But as the lead guys get more girly, so, it seems, do the women. The main...
...film, after all, is seen through the eyes of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a quiet small-town barber who manages to remain taciturn even as the film’s narrator. Instead of talking, he observes and listens. In this way, he learns that his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini). And by listening to an entrepreneur (Jon Polito) seeking funding for a dry cleaning venture, Ed decides to break out of his hair-cutting rut and put up the money...
Affectlessness is not a quality much prized in movie protagonists, but Billy Bob Thornton, that splendid actor, does it perfectly as Ed Crane, a taciturn small-town barber, circa 1949. Everyone cheats on him--his wife, his business partner, his teen lover, his hotshot lawyer. By the movie's end, he is facing his final comeuppance, deadpan sangfroid still miraculously intact. The ever astonishing Coen brothers say their film was inspired by the spirit of James M. Cain's novels about ill-fated dopes. But the Coens transcend Cain. If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking--hilarious...
...three graces of Dublin,” the elderly sisters Julia and Kate Morkan, along with their niece Jane, hold a traditional party. At the party that the audience attends are a host of assembled characters somehow familiar but whom only Joyce could have written with any spark: a taciturn opera singer, an oddly cantankerous young girl, a merry drunkard and his mother (who manages to make Herod’s wife look like Mrs. Brady). All of these characters are auxiliary to Joyce’s self-referential creation, Gabriel (played with remarkable agility and discretion by Sean Cullen...
...what about Pinter the man? In his speech of thanks on being awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize in 1995, he acknowledged, "I am well aware that I have been described ... as enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding." Yet colleagues say his reputation as the angry old man of British theater is unfair, even if he did turn down a knighthood from Prime Minister John Major saying, "I would not accept such recognition from a Conservative government." "He's passionate, with a very short fuse," says Hall, "but he's also extremely warm and kind." Ian Holm recalls...