Assayas, rather than depicting an amiable young sci-fi director, could have depicted a fiery, introverted, idiosyncratic genius, a furiously imaginative young man or woman.
Like Entourage, it's amiable rather than funny.
But maybe not if all the reviews are similar to Daily Variety's, which ran last week, describing the film as "very laid back and not very funny," "amiable rather than genuinely funny" and with box-office prospects "no more than average".
A small garrison of "invalides" was appointed in 1749 to guard the interior and exterior of the fortress; these were retired soldiers and were regarded locally, as Simon Schama describes, as "amiable layabouts" rather than professional soldiers.
In American Negro Slavery (1918), Phillips refers to slaves as "negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression".
But "Don Quixote" can, and should, be more than amiable.
But there were signs that the parting of the ways was less than amiable.
Directed by Peter Wood, "On the Razzle" is indeed less dazzling than amiable.
Mr. Thain, a dead ringer for Clark Kent, is cautiously amiable and seemed to act out, rather than inhabit, the role of C.E.O.
The show's use of "blind auditions" – in which the judges make their first decision on the sound of singers rather than their looks – results, Cohen suggests, in a more amiable atmosphere.
