Word: contemptibles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Based quite faithfully on an Elmore Leonard best seller, Get Shorty is most significantly true to the book's basic attitude toward Hollywood. Perhaps because he deals with the movie business from a position of strength--he writes things it needs--Leonard omits the contempt with which novelists traditionally drench their Hollywood horror stories. Leonard simply drops a real killer in among the rubber sharks, then sits back watchfully, his only comment a benign (or, at worst, sardonic) chuckle as his hero quietly chews them...
...marginal player, working in hopeless enterprises like Moment to Moment and Perfect, not to mention projects headed straight to video (The Tender)--and really doesn't see much difference between the two. Even when he had a hit like Look Who's Talking, it was an object of contempt in all the better circles. And along the way, he managed to turn down eventual winners like Arthur, Splash and An Officer and a Gentleman and get aced out of things like The Player at the last minute, all without apparent regret...
...waiting for someone in the media to say something about the grace and dignity of the Simpson family. Eunice Simpson, a woman in her 80s who truly believed her son was innocent, offered not one word of hate or contempt. No matter how you come down on the verdict, you have to admire her courage...
...ever was. In Los Angeles 50 years ago a "Negro" risked his life (or anyway a nasty beating) if he was found in a white neighborhood or in the company of a white woman. And the cops, of course, could be counted on to treat him with brutal contempt (perhaps the only American tradition that has survived intact to this...
...American Dissidents' Hall of Fame: Martin Luther King Jr., Lenny Bruce, Al Sharpton, flag burner Gregory Johnson, Indian activist Leonard Peltier, Attica prison rioters, Malcolm X and-decades later-Malcolm's daughter Qubilah Shabazz. Kunstler's combative defense of the Chicago Seven brought him four years' worth of contempt citations (none of it served). His use of courtrooms as high- profile political platforms often worked to client's and cause's good, but not always-leading to the rueful observation that Kunstler was "the only lawyer who could get you the death penalty for a traffic ticket...