Word: girlishness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Everything about the film is predictable, except for our growing discomfort with Zellweger. It is rare, and awful, to watch an Oscar winner valiantly attempt to convince us, against all evidence to the contrary, that it makes sense for her to be playing girlish and cute in a negligible comedy. She's about to turn 40, which absolutely does not mean she's no longer allowed to fall in love onscreen. But Zellweger has undeniably changed since her Bridget Jones's Diary days, and her fitness to continue in the same romantic-comedy vein as Bridget is very much...
...same picture of the Holy Father could also bear traces of Bacon's anguished dealings with his own father, a truculent English army officer turned horse trainer who moved the family to Ireland, where Bacon was born in 1909. "Eddie" Bacon eventually rejected his girlish son and, if Bacon's not always reliable stories can be trusted, even had him whipped by stableboys to make...
Alternative rockers keep a clear conscience about all the borrowing because their hodgepodge sound is homemade, not the formula of a record company. "I don't like labels," warns alternative rocker Juliana Hatfield, a winsome woman with a girlish voice and a guitar that barks. "But if you want to put me in that category, it's O.K. with me, because being labeled alternative has a certain amount of respect that goes along with it. It means that you've started out on your own, the ethic of doing everything yourself...
That's the mood the Mamma Mia! movie tries to tap, but with a sledgehammer. The cast, especially the older women, is given to giggles and girlish body language. You're meant to think everyone making the film had a great time, so you should too. At one point, Streep shouts, "Let's go have fun!" But the bonhomie is oppressive; the high spirits are not impromptu but imposed: Listen, people, you vill haff...
...progressions - opposites not only attract, they learn from each other - only that, within these conventions, the movie is smart, funny and beguiling. Hitting familiar buttons isn?t a sin if the exercise is carried off expertly, as it is here. And the two stars, deprived of the opportunity for girlish giggling they took undue advantage of as SNL?s Weekend Update anchors, relax into their characters, give them a dimension precisely as real as this kind of movie requires...