There's a patness and a clinical quality to this evolution.

Joanna herself was a little surprised at the movielike patness of it.

It came out with a tired patness.

Too bad that patness and platitudes aren't avoided.

This ending, for all its seeming fantasy and patness, has the conviction of a fervently sung spiritual.

The eloquent statement you have just made, for instance--it carries all the patness of old conviction.

But I haven't noticed any patness."

The patness of the theme is redeemed by Peter Werner's generally understated direction and the controlled performances.

This overexplicitness, shading every so often into patness, is what keeps "Lying Awake" from climbing the highest rungs of art.

Macdonald snickered, and he looked up at her with shrewd humor, enjoying the patness of the motto with her.

The movies shifted from stiff, stark, enraged fables, decisive to the point of patness, to something more relaxed and ruminative and questioning.

If this idea produces a certain patness by the time "The Joy Luck Club" is over, it also helps to impose order on an otherwise sprawling narrative.

It's the fact that Miss Ringwald, despite the patness and oversimplification of the story, proves herself to be an even more versatile and captivating talent than she has before.

I got promotions"), the patness of the lines suggests that we are in for a well-meaning, slightly whiny issue movie; whereupon McCullers changes issues, and saves the day.

We sense a patness, an awkwardness at dynamics, a tendency to paint goodness - in Teddy, in his grandmother, in an old professor couple - with overindulgent shades of good.

These two stories allow a little room for mystery to seep in, and so elude what is a nagging flaw in Boyle's short (and sometimes his long) fiction, a certain patness.

For all its patness, the movie also has a gritty realism that is not found in many higher-priced versions of the same thing, and its happy ending is not the typical Hollywood leap into fantasy.

Lewis had been very eloquent in explaining how things should be, even if he wasn't working with the whole story, while Mally had an offhand manner about her that gave her reasoning a little too much patness.

The moment that the older man decides that the younger one resembles him 35 years earlier, Vincent and Bradley start to learn from each other with unconvincing patness, to the point of exchanging polemical positions, rhetorical phrases and even wardrobe colors.

The vulgarity of patness of Paris and Thurso representing Virtue and Vice might also be a contemporary imposition on the 18th c. - when there actually were abolitionist arguments (though not against Thatcher . . .) and arguments for the emancipation of women.