Word: acerbic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After three decades on the Reprise label, singing acerb ballads and jingles that became hits for others (I Think It's Going to Rain Today, Mama Told Me Not to Come) and, vagrantly, for himself (Short People, I Love L.A.), Newman has moved to DreamWorks to release his first album of plain old songs since Land of Dreams, his 1988 masterpiece of autobiographical melancholy. How nice to discover that a change of venue hasn't changed his mood. On the 12 cuts of Bad Love, Newman still sees the world as a nasty place full of sad, warped people...
...hidden national treasure of political common sense. Analyzing the hatred some people have for Clinton, Shearer ladles blame and caustic wit on the President, his G.O.P. posse and the moralizing TV newsies with their "hideously bad acting." It's a smart challenge to lazy thinking. Along with another acerb little volume, Gore Vidal's The American Presidency, it can be taken as an ideal chaser to the recent binge of Monicaholism. Hemlock, anyone...
...also expect the movie to be a hit, and to solidify Lawrence's rep as a multimedia comedy star: Richard Pryor, the next generation. Lawrence has Pryor's bantam pugnacity, but he lacks the underdog charm, the skewed genius for mimicry and acerb social humor. He has got the Pryor attitude but not the aptitude. And maybe there can be another difference: Lawrence must keep from setting himself and his career on fire...
...graces three indie films out this month. In Linklater's acerb subUrbia, a kind of strip-mall Rent without the singing (or quite so much self-pity), she plays a rock publicist who mingles dangerously with the lowlifes. In Greg Mottola's stodgy The Daytrippers she's the younger daughter of a Long Island, New York, family given to public declarations of emotional frailty. And in Christopher Guest's haphazardly delightful Waiting for Guffman she's a fast-food counter girl who gets the chance to co-star in a tacky musical tribute to Blaine, Missouri. Posey graces so many...
...postwar era of Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee, addressed homosexual themes, it did so in the metaphorical closet. The modern gay writer can address his dreams and demons directly; and in the aids plague, he has a suitable subject for domestic tragedy. Today the gay sensibility -- acerb, lusty, nostalgic, poignant -- dominates high drama and low comedy...