Word: torpor
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...much older man chosen by her father. In Britain, she lives the soporific life of an Asian housewife, raising two daughters (after a son dies in infancy) and attending to her undemanding, if uninspiring, husband. Years - and far too many pages - pass uneventfully before Nazneen shakes off her torpor to conduct an affair with a younger man slightly less feckless than her husband. Eventually, she dumps both men and strikes out on her own, but so timidly that her independence seems doomed. Nazneen's life is contrasted with that of her sister Hasina back in Bangladesh, whose story is told...
...festival prizes abroad; both were banned at home, and Tian was forbidden to make movies for seven years. His comeback film, Springtime in a Small Town, is a remake of a 1948 film by the Shanghai director Fei Mu. A young married couple lives in a kind of genteel torpor, broken by the arrival of the wife's ex-lover. More a still life than a drama, Tian's gorgeous portrait of anxiety and anticipation gains power in part from its time and place (China a year before Mao's Revolution), in part from the director's own tiptoeing through...
...comic characters, not all manage watchable performances. Chin's gruff, soulful Chu is a match for Tong Tong, and Leung earns kudos as the least annoying fat kid in recent Chinese cinema. But Ho's Ming does little more than sweat. Wong's manic energy nicely counters the Chus' torpor, but his strangled-cat tone deserves an even worse punishment than the film finally delivers...
...somnolence is contagious and you can spot the new arrivals by the briskness of their gaits. On the streets, teenagers conduct confabulations on motorbikes?two or three abreast?scarcely going fast enough to remain vertical. Rheumy-eyed old timers lean on fences in the grip of some nameless torpor. Silent saffron parades of monks glide by, footsteps raising little puffs of dust, stooping now and then to solicit alms. Time creeps by. You imagine some indolent imp has fallen asleep inside your watch and gummed up its works. Indeed, Luang Prabang might just be the best value holiday destination...
...conceit, could be the Farrellys' mission statement about their fascination with human eccentricities: retardation in There's Something About Mary, albinism in Me, Myself & Irene, obesity, spinal bifida and vestigial tails here. We mock, they say, because we care. But that doesn't make the film elevating or amusing. Torpor sticks to the actors' feet like gum on a movieplex floor. Will Hal make you laugh? Fat chance...