Word: taut
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...Corner? Or the tortured Capra hero whose trust in American values was tested past all endurance, till he tumbled close to madness? Or the pixilated Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey, his best friend an invisible rabbit? Or the vengeful loner of the Anthony Mann westerns of the '50s--taut epics like Bend of the River and The Man from Laramie--in which Stewart often played a bitter Moses leading settlers to the far country he could never call home? Or the slick rural attorney in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, a little too comfortable with the trial...
...fuel the writing of a book. The result is a quirky, relaxed account, as much family journal as boat biography. Coomer, who's a novelist (Kentucky Love, The Loop), has a sure way with words, as when he tells how, a new-hatched captain, he held Yonder's "taut wet anchor line in my hand as if it were the reins to the planet...
...reporters and violates journalism's quaint, faint imperative to work for only one paycheck and report even awkward truths. The counterbalancing urgency--biological warfare, for Pete's sake--makes Truell's decision too easy, so that in the last chapters a paunch begins to show on what was a taut and enjoyable job of writing...
...were Ingres, Miro and Picasso--and among his contemporaries, the tragically fated Gorky, who would kill himself in 1948. "I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," de Kooning wrote soon af-ter Gorky's death, and the Armenian painter's recurved, taut line, describing edge and implying volume in a single gesture, was preserved in the Dutchman's work. In fact, de Kooning's filial relation to Gorky resembled one played out in American art a century before: that of Frederic Church, the great landscapist, to his teacher Thomas Cole...
...duty as an enigmatically watchful neighbor-lover-ally patiently to offer her that option, and he does it with his customary brooding grace. It's the duty of a lot of good character actors to keep driving her in the opposite direction, toward the end of her very taut tether. It is the very great pleasure of this movie (well written by Ann Biderman) that its truly haunting suspense derives not from Smilla's conflict with her external enemies but from her own demons...