I guess it's better than scenes set in a psychiatrist's office, ponderous voice-overs, that weird unseen neighbor in "Home Improvement" or any of the other devices that turn internal monologue into quipster dialogue.
"It would be the largest structure between the Adirondacks and Manhattan," Ned Sullivan, president of the advocacy group Scenic Hudson, says in the documentary, which tells its story with an efficient combination of interviews and clips (and no ponderous voice-over).
The action is sometimes cut off at awkward moments by ponderous newsreel-style voice-over or potted lectures in cultural history.
O'Mara, a straight arrow combat veteran with an anxious wife (Mireille Enos) and a baby boomer on the way, lays down a ponderous chunk of voice-over before settling down to assemble his team, which has the structure of a classic combat movie platoon.
What stops things getting too ponderous is Li's voice, a fragile warble that places her in the pop, not rock or soul, pantheon.
Though lending his voice to Lewis Carroll's ponderous Blue Caterpillar stands as a rather minor role in Rickman's packed CV, it does serve as a lasting reminder of his role in shaping pop culture.
"We may not always agree on matters of state," I said, not in my own voice, but in that loud, ponderous one I knew just as well.
Such a voice and such a character — whose ponderous bonhomie and autodidactic grandiloquence simultaneously mask and reveal his ultimate coldness — are far out of reach for Gores.
With his veteran downtown troupe (Nancy Bannon, Rob Besserer, Marc Kenison, Heather Olson, Chrysa Parkinson and Greg Zuccolo, Mr. O'Connorr has created a distinct theatrical voice that is simultaneously humorous and ponderous.
The spectacular sites are observed with a sense of awe (through the cinematography of James Freeman) that only rarely yields to the picturesque (and the narration is occasionally ponderous, though raised to poetic glory by the resonant voice of Orson Welles).
But the more he said it, the more the undertone of exasperation in his voice made him sound like someone saying, with ponderous emphasis: "I've said I'm sorry, all right?" and not meaning it at all.
