Word: unself
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...heartwarming, we mutter to ourselves. But there's something better than that about this kid and Ellen Page's performance in the role. There's something unself-consciously brave about the way she pushes her burgeoning belly through the school cafeteria, something very nice about the way her father (J.K. Simmons) and step-mother (Allison Janney) support her without losing their tartness (or their reality) in the process, something authentically sweet about the way her relationship with Paulie keeps believably developing. The screenwriter, Diablo Cody, knows the limits of this story and, better still, the limits of our patience...
Davidson, 64, carries an air of peremptory self-assurance. He unself-consciously enjoys his place in the plutocracy. During a tour of the Lake Tahoe manse he and Jan, 63, call Glen Eagle, he showed me his red Ferrari, his private theater and the two 32-ft. totem poles just inside the entry. They are made from cedar at least 750 years old and feature carvings of the Davidsons and their three kids, who are now grown. Bob sees his work for the gifted as akin to the patronage that sustained the artists and inventors of the Renaissance. His view...
...sustained by, an utterly unwarranted belief in themselves. Ferrell knows, as surely as his characters don't, that his body is nothing to boast about. So to display it as if it were worthy of a Muscle & Fitness cover is to tell us that they are as unself-conscious as they are self-unaware. Ferrell might be the fellow who ran naked across the stage at the 1974 Oscar ceremony, inspiring this ad lib by David Niven: "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping...
Beah's book, A Long Way Gone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 229 pages), which comes out this month, is a breathtaking and unself-pitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all the innocence has suddenly been sucked out. It's a truly riveting memoir. But just as crucial to its success is its arrival at what might be called a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier. The kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural trope of late. He's in novels, movies, magazines and on TV, flaunting his Uzi like a giant foam...
...Watching the premature and apparently unself-conscious aging of the participants, I wonder if, in the fifth or sixth year of each cycle, they say to themselves, "Time to get a rinse, lose a stone or two, pull my marriage together and straighten out my kids." But that may be the bias of an American, relying on the superficial, the lure of eternal adolescence, more than your average Brit...