Word: taciturn
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Road to Perdition, which opens next month, isn't your typical Tom Hanks movie. The Nicest Guy in Hollywood plays a taciturn hit man in Depression-era Chicago--not the kind of movie you'd expect to see in the summer. No clones. No superheroes. And the car chases never exceed 45 m.p.h. It will be released on July 12, right between Men in Black II (July 3) and Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26). Walter Parkes, co-head of the DreamWorks film division, concedes that "it's an unusual time to release an R-rated adult picture...
...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...