But while other mass races might give you solemnity and nerves, the Great Ethiopian Run is sheer, exuberant, ear-to-ear-grinning fun.
First, it gives a solemnity to the sticky business of handing over the moolah.
Given the solemnity of this far-fetched development, it's also possible that Coetzee is gently parodying messianic delusions among people who have nothing else to sustain them.
And every so often he deploys a white smile, one as engaging as it is unexpected, given the solemnity of his long, undertaker's face.
The movie "does try something a little bit new and perhaps, given the solemnity that has overtaken so much comic-book-based filmed entertainment, a little bit risky," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in May.
Given the solemnity of the times, several of Mr. Bush's friends say, he has restrained his natural jocularity but also sought a balance so as not to set too gloomy a tone.
She walked in there with her skirt swaying from her lovely hips, and her hair, which she had tied up in a ponytail, given the solemnity of the occasion, also swinging from side to side, and for the same reason her usually bare feet were in a pair of sandals.
Its spirituality and attendant solemnity give the story and the movie an air of importance that would both justify and conceal its emptiness, that would convert its defects into virtues.
Del Toro generally manages to keep triumphalism at bay, avoids solemnity, gives each nation a fair share of the limelight and cheerfully embraces the mock seriousness that such films insist on.
