The earlier film, though small and upbeat, was also stamped with Mr. Guédiguian's profound empathy for working people struggling to make ends meet.
The biggest moments in this engaging tale are small, and relentlessly upbeat: intimacy trumps bigotry, music expands minds, violence is averted where 10 years earlier it would have been all but assured.
I tried to keep things upbeat, making small talk while examining his belly.
Small, balding and relentlessly upbeat, he balances the books, negotiates the contracts and cheerfully presides over sparsely attended Town Hall meetings, rolling out his latest cost-saving measures, his reading glasses invariably dangling around his neck.
Gulf Keystone Petroleum, an oil explorer beloved of small investors, released an upbeat update on an Iraqi oil discovery, but even that was not enough to avoid the rout.
We watch a mother offer the murky water to her small children — and the upbeat message is: you can help ensure that other people don't have do that, either.
Even Ryan's scorching assault on Obama, which the serious media has rightly been excoriating for its factual distortions and omissions, was couched in the language of a disappointed small-town American, an upbeat Reaganite aghast at what he sees around him.
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The Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index for the fourth quarter of 2013 released in November was more upbeat noting that small business optimism was at "the second highest score in the last five years, the Index score is below pre-recession levels".
He lifted his arms high to crash down on small, dry cymbals; he stressed upbeats, played loud in ballads and tied his rhythmic cycles into knots, getting an intentional trash-can sound.
