Word: torpid
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...Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, historians R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee write that during the first period of interaction, from 1841 to around 1900, China's view of the U.S. was a mixture of wonder and fear. Woken from torpid indifference to the outside world by humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars, the Qing mandarins decided China must strengthen itself by observing the ways of other countries. But for all their awe at America's technological prowess, of "fire-wheeled vehicles" that moved faster than a Daoist sage "riding...
...rest is a fairly stately, sometimes stilted evocation of antique attitudes and older, better movies. The torpid pace and expertly muted cinematography (by Caleb Deschanel) inevitably suggest the fading fragrance of those flowers Fante described. Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life...
...torpid summer night in Florida, the kind made for watching DVD movies, lying motionless in refrigerated living rooms. Yet here is Eddie Ventrice, 43, tie off, shirt untucked, sprawled in the VIP section of the Muvico Palace theater for a 7:05 showing of War of the Worlds. Sure, he's got a 60-in. set at home as well as a 40-in. flat screen, not to mention a wife and kids. Sure, his ticket cost $18. But here he gets to hang with two buddies and watch killer aliens on the big screen. There's a lobby...
...been a torpid year for Hollywood and, by extension, for most movie theaters. Attendance is down 10% from last year. Theater owners and industry execs blame the drop not on this year's bombs but on last year's hits, namely Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which together made up the $500 million box-office difference. But so-so selections only remind moviegoers of the other reasons they're avoiding movie theaters these days: double-digit prices, irritating commercials and that imbecile down front with the Mariah Carey ringtone...
...Harold Pinter all brooded under the skin of Sam Shepard's naturalism. So the film version, which Shepard wrote and stars in, should be an event and not a puzzlement. In "opening up" the play, Robert Altman has dissipated some of its caged-animal tension and replaced it with torpid mannerisms. Eddie (Shepard) sucks all the existential meaning out of a toothpick; May (Kim Basinger) thumbs her full lips; the Old Man (Harry Dean Stanton), who has intruded on both their lives way too long, tenderizes a harmonica and gulps down his guilt...