Word: joylessness
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...that sounds bad, it looked even worse. He came across as nervous, his eyes tracking the teleprompter, emphasizing the wrong words, and inserting sarcasm into phrases written to be sincere. In these settings, McCain can appear impatient and phony. He will attempt to cover up his discomfort with quick joyless flashes of an unconvincing grin...
Very soon more conventional critics got hold of Frank's book. "Sick" and "joyless" were two of the milder terms they used. But in the 1960s, amid the general dismantling of all national certainties, The Americans was revisited and then very quickly understood as indispensable. For one thing, it brought to American photography the same tragic dimension that American fiction had arrived at long before. It also paved the way for a new kind of documentary photography, one that was more personal and idiosyncratic and much stranger. Because of The Americans, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, virtuosos of the mordant...
...crusade against smoking is succeeding through an unholy alliance of the joyless left and the pious right, Christians wary of vice and anemic secularists terrified of their own extinction. Their campaign to stave off death at all costs does not stop at smoking, which, after all, only kills the smoker. Sex, alcohol, and food are all equally suspect. Thus we see efforts to implement “trans-fat” bans, repressive drinking-age laws, and masturbation advocacy programs such as the Masturbate-a-thon in Clerkenwell, London in 2006 or books such as Walter O Bocking?...
...half century earlier. The bride (Gummer) loved Harris too, but it is Ann (played as a young woman by Danes), an aspiring jazz singer, who gets close to him. Instructive tragedy, however, interrupts their romantic interlude, warning them that the way of the uppercrust WASP must remain dutiful and joyless...
...good zombie-movie send up and not a really bad zombie snoozefest.Tarantino, on the other hand, flips the genre on its head instead of blissfully sending it up, over-reaching with a pretentious brand of meta-cinema that leaves his segment a little less hyperkinetic and a lot more joyless than Rodriguez’s. It mixes a slasher film with car chases, which basically means that the film starts out being one thing but ends up being something else entirely.The film revolves around a psychotic stuntman (Kurt “Snake Plissken” Russell, in a piece...