Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, it has moments of wayward life, especially in contrast to the smug torpor of Star Trek V, which William Shatner directed from a script by David Loughery. That "final frontier" mentioned in its title is nothing more than your standard black hole, through which the starship Enterprise is commanded to navigate by a not very menacing religious fanatic named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill). He imagines he will find God lurking back of this particular beyond. What he finds instead is, of course, a false deity manifested in the form of an unpersuasive special effect...
...under a flat-topped acacia tree. She yawns, and her mouth is an abrupt vision of medieval horrors, of ripping white spikes. And then the mouth closes and she is a smug, serene Victorian dowager. She complacently surveys her young, who sleep near by, and subsides again into her torpor...
...north of bustling Atlanta, it is an amiably sleepy town of about 2,000 souls (all of Forsyth County has only 38,000). Its biggest employer is a poultry-processing plant; its biggest social activity for adolescents is drag-racing outside the K mart. But for all its bucolic torpor, Cumming bears a dark stain on its history: an 18-year-old white woman was beaten and raped there one day in 1912 and, before she died, named three blacks as her attackers. One was lynched, the other two tried and hanged before a gloating crowd. There were so many...
Earlier that night, this Father Abraham of the apocalypse had vowed to surrender his beloved son if God would only restore everything to its earlier state of blessed torpor. And come morning, all is restored, in spades. Mama is whining, Daughter is pouting, Doctor is leaving. The world may not be ending, but theirs is -- with a whimper. For Alexander, the only rational response is to go crazy. He carefully sets the house afire and (in a wondrous 6 1/2-min. shot) runs about the grounds, eluding his family until he is carted off in an ambulance, and the gutted house...
...friend, confiding a querulous eyebrow or subtle grimace, simultaneously inhabiting and commenting on her role. Nicholson has a tougher assignment. He is, here, only half a man, all surface and no substance, and finally he distances himself from Mark, his face going slack in a kind of moral torpor. But when he smiles at Rachel like a cat with Tweety Pie feathers on his lips or croons nonsense to his firstborn, Nicholson reveals the charm that hides the folly. You can hate Mark for his cruelty or love him for his robust grace and fine, sharp humor. Same with this...