It's the 65th anniversary of the Village Vanguard, the greatest and oldest jazz club in Manhattan, and the trumpeter Roy Hargrove brings in his cheery hard-bop quartet to celebrate it.
"In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale)," she said, adding that Mr. Boyle "plucked my heartstrings" with "well-practiced dexterity, coaxing laughter and sobs out of each sweet, sour and false note".
Standing there in the wide, well-stocked aisles bathed in cheery light, it was hard to imagine that the constant struggle to get enough to eat had actually been real for me or for anyone.
Part of the design of the character was to give the other characters a true boss – an actual authority figure whose rules and regulations meant they had to toe certain lines, even while his endlessly cheery disposition made it hard to argue with him".
But for all the cheery talk, Democrats are working hard to remind Nassau voters that their state senators are creations of the Republican machine that brought the county close to financial ruin.
When children lift the panels to read the hard facts behind the cheery packaging, the lights go out.
Its single window provides a rectangular view of the hard edges and dismally cheery colors of the retail space — and the unaccommodating world — beyond.
In a month drenched with music, lights, and reminders to be cheery, it can feel so much harder to just sit with sad feelings and grieve.
Russell's work is stranded between lands real and imagined: the street and the cornfield; the soft bohemian New York and the hard Studio 54 New York; the cheery bold strokes of pop and the liberating possibilities of abstract art.
If you push too hard at trying to do "cheery" things, you're going to make him feel parented, or condescended to.
Nodding to his Olympics experience, he added, "Now I understand how hard it is to compose a cheery little song".
