Word: taut
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...could not have presented more dramatic summations, their lines of argument taut and forcefully drawn. Indeed, channel grazers happening past Court TV last week might well have mistaken the proceedings for a staged show, complete with great clothes and great cheekbones. Unlike scripted dramas, however, these closing arguments went on for hours, with attorneys wielding charts and digressing repeatedly to help jurors sort through the 101 witnesses and 401 exhibits paraded concurrently before the brothers' separate juries. It then took Judge Stanley Weisberg more than an hour to issue jury instructions on the subtle variations in mental state that distinguish...
...News Special Report (Dec. 9, 9 p.m. EST), which launches the network's antiviolence campaign, addresses an ugly statistic: between 1985 and 1990, teen deaths by gun rose 77%. Host Tabitha Soren interviews gang members and profiles community groups struggling to curtail the slaughter. It's a taut, tough half hour...
Director Mike Leigh, a veteran of TV, stage and movies, works idiosyncratically, letting plot and character evolve from improvisations and brainstorming sessions with his cast. Over a period of weeks, a taut shooting script emerges. The result is depressing and uncompromising. In Britain Naked's unredeemed hostility is straining the loyalty of Leigh's many admirers. In Cannes, however, the film won him the Best Director award this year, and David Thewlis, who is brilliant as rotten Johnny, was named Best Actor. Life for Leigh's lower-class mates is nasty and brutish; women are doormats and men are misogynists...
Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally connected -- a single work of art, no less united than a mural is, but portable. Migration has the effect of a visual ballad, with each painting a stanza: taut, compressed, pared down to the barest requirements of narration. No. 10, They Were Very Poor, takes the elements of a Southern sharecropper's life down to the static minimum: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an enormous nail -- the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion. There...
What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed. This, of course, is not the contrast to his taut, persuasively realistic earlier work that Singleton wanted to strike...