The imbalance between the movie's mild pleasures and its casual failures may be found in exactly this burden of the cultural heritage: a mistaken deference on Winterbottom's part to the performers and their language, as if theatre and literature, even in this minor refraction, had a greater claim on attention than a movie director's ideas, which remain invisible.
But this moment was the peak of the affair; since then his feelings have settled into mild, occasional pleasure.
Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being.
In a New York fall art season given over to mild Modernist pleasures, this show, which opens on Sunday, is a reminder of Modernism's mutinous, myth-scouring origins.
For me an avid audiobook listener, and a "Reading Rainbow" and "Star Trek" agnostic with deep admiration for "Roots LeVar Burton Readsds" produces a strange combination of skepticism, mild aversion, and pleasure.
Back when Frank was approaching a year old, I determined that the best was acceptable for him and came up with an old Paul Bocuse recipe for a gâteau aux marrons that isn't difficult but is unusual and sets off the nut's mild and chewy pleasures with a fail-safe film of chocolate.
He smiles with the pleasure of mild self-abasement.
As a leisure activity, superhots offer some of the pleasures of mild drugs and extreme sports without requiring one to break the law or work out.
I learned, like many of my generation, to view TV as one of the home's mild dangers, carrier of both pleasure and pollution.
Again, sound bites escape the mouth, and they justify an ending with relief at gaining a little more free time, and at giving my sore body and tired voice a rest, but how much pleasure in these mild inconveniences have I been hiding behind the larger fear that I won't be needed to contribute the part of me that feels most alive, until I'm one day, hopefully, invited back into the ring?
