Inveterate

inveterate







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D



–adjective 

1. settled or confirmed in a habit, practice, feeling, or the like: an inveterate gambler. 

2. firmly established by long continuance, as a disease, habit, practice, feeling, etc.; chronic. 



Synonyms:

1. hardened, constant, habitual. 2. set, fixed, rooted.





　

Not for nothing does the movie put its cradle-robbing creep in the image- making biz. Hard Candy, seductively shot in hi-def DV by music video director David Slade, contrives to wag its own finger at itself—to have its bonbon and eat it too. 



Right from the film's opening peep at instant sex- messaging, Slade goads us to admit taking guilty pleasure even from within a scenario as criminal as this one. Maybe Slade's first RW close-up—of a fork slowly sliding its way through moist cake—is already stepping over the line. 



(Or maybe that comes in the next two shots, whose insinuation of sexual appetite I can't even attempt to describe for fear of crossing the line myself.) 



In any case, one thing leads to another between these inveterate flirts (rapid-fire innuendo is easy with online practice), and the two proceed blushingly to the shooter's Hollywood Hills bungalow, a set whose Almodóvarian mise-en-scéne essentially allows Slade to blame the pedophile's interior-decorating sensibilities for our arousal. 



At least until the tables are turned (and a bit after, I'd say), Hard Candy is film noir as bright-red lollipop: Its intoxicating visuals lower our defenses as effectively as the roofie that Riding Hood slips to the big bad wolf in his own lair. 





starch

staunch

stanch

a staunch [Republican]

The crux of the film is the staunchly [Catholic] More's refusal 

Yet despite Gabrielle's staunch work [ethic], she values her privacy [over] her professional career and lives in a modest house with her aging mother.

Leonard's parents are Ruth and Reuben Kraditor, long-married, [staunchly] bourgeois, reasonable. 

Amalgamation