Word: wanly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mechanics of Dana's despair and salvation are managed with no special grace by writers Andrew Fleming and Pam Brady, and haphazardly directed by Fleming. He's done wan remakes of The In-laws and Nancy Drew, but the film closest to Hamlet 2 was the 1999 comedy Dick, which enlisted a slew of Saturday Night Live veterans (Will Ferrell, Harry Shearer, Ana Gasteyer, Jim Breuer) in the fanciful tale of two girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) who wander off from a White House tour and get entangled with President Nixon. That one sounded funnier than...
...directed by Rob Cohen, whose high-hack work includes Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and The Fast and the Furious, this Mummy movie is really two movies: a good adventure epic, with all the Chinese people, and a wan one, with O'Connells and the other the Westerners. Their character motivation is sketchy, their verbal wit scant; at times a scene revs to its climax and, instead of issuing some clever deflating retort, the actor will gaze dumbly into the camera, as if this were a rough cut, with the punch line to be edited in later. To camouflage...
...there is another Macau, one the high rollers never visit, that sounds plaintive rather than prosperous. Take a taxi from the dancing fountains in front of the Wynn Macau hotel to the working-class neighborhood of Hac Sa Wan, where you can meet Ng Iat-keong, one of the many poor Macanese for whom the casino boom has been a bust. Ng, 45, is a construction worker who helped build some of Macau's hotel-casinos, including the biggest of them all, Las Vegas Sands' giant Venetian. Yet the money sloshing around in their plush suites hasn't found...
...card dealers in casinos, for example, must be Macanese - the surge of imported staff has led to complaints that outsiders are reaping a disproportionate amount of the benefits of Macau's boom. "We locals are losing our jobs and the government couldn't care less," gripes Chan Chi-wan, a 50-year-old construction worker. In many cases, moreover, wage increases are being offset by soaring inflation, currently running at an annual average rate of about 9%. Frustrated Macanese have taken to the streets in protest several times over the past few years. Although citizens have no history of civil...
...hear a loud snap at this moment, it's the audience's credulity, as Swing Vote falls from agreeable fable into wan satire. Why 10 days? To show that the electoral process is a shameless sham in which politicians pretzel their principles to get elected. The two candidates come courting Bud. Drawing their own inferences from his cryptic remarks, the Republican (Kelsey Grammer) suddenly plumps for gay marriage, while the Democrat (Dennis Hopper) turns pro-life. The movie says these are decent men forced to reverse field by their Machiavellian advisers (Stanley Tucci as, essentially, Karl Rove; Nathan Lane...