Word: clockwork
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...utility and its ability to impart ethical lessons through delightful language. This line of thought has gone out of vogue, both for aesthetic reasons and because it has become abundantly clear that there is nothing particularly ennobling about high culture itself. After all, Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” raped and murdered to Beethoven’s Ninth, and the Nazis were known to listen to Wagner with rapture after a good day’s genocide. Harvard English professors themselves—who have spent a lifetime immersed in literary scholarship—are hardly...
...more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy. Director Marc Forster and a tony cast (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah) hit every punch line with a gong, and Ferrell, who's quiet and fine, seems as lost among them as Harold is in his suddenly fictional world...
...happens like clockwork, every afternoon at 4 p.m. Hours before families around the country get ready to sit down for dinner, executives at Yahoo! notice the words "chicken" and "recipe" registering large spikes in the portal's list of top search queries. Not only that, but a million searches each week include the name of an identifiable food item...
...that I realized what I found so strange about our interaction. He treated our relationship like a business transaction. He made notes on his Microsoft Outlook task list to get back to me. He signed all his e-mails with “Regards, David.” Like clockwork, he’d call every morning, lunch hour, and evening. He answered the phone with his full name. My boyfriend wasn’t predictable; he was robotic. We were sleeping together, but it was the most impersonal relationship I’d ever been...
...office star of the '30s was 6 years old when she became a leading lady. Kids by the millions wanted her curls, her doll, the nonalcoholic cocktail named for her. Oh, there was a clockwork tinge to her adorability, her sugary films were anathema to sophisticates, and parts of her plantation musicals (such as The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel in this set) were, and are, criminally patronizing. But even Dakota Fanning doesn't hit every one out of the park and, man, Shirley could tap-dance--dance away the Depression, some said, or at least the depression...