Word: mongrel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...difference between the two starts with the words themselves: eccentric, after all, carries a distinguished Latin pedigree that refers, quite reasonably, to anything that departs from the center; weird, by comparison, has its mongrel origins in the Old English wyrd, meaning fate or destiny; and the larger, darker forces conjured up by the term -- Macbeth's weird sisters and the like -- are given an extra twist with the slangy, bastard suffix -o. Beneath the linguistic roots, however, we feel the difference on our pulses. The eccentric we generally regard as something of a donny, dotty, harmless type, like the British...
...random shots of Lumberton, the film's seemingly idyllic smalltown locale. Big-hearted firemen wave in slow-motion, houses and trees and citizens stand their ground. Then a middle-aged man has a seizure watering his lawn. The hose spurts above him with sexual abandon, and a mongrel dog lunges on the misdirected spray. Lynch follows this with a close-up of insects teeming in the rich grass. He sticks your nose down into the nest, and the theater fills with brittle bug noises...
...Caine exudes satiny menace. And Director Neil Jordan (who wrote the + script with David Leland) tells the story from George's point of view while filming it in a style as fancy and knowing as Simone's. No wonder audiences have taken to this gritty romance as to a mongrel puppy; for at heart Mona Lisa is an old-fashioned poor-soul weepie, and George is less a Cagney rakehell than a Chaplin tramp. Ever clever, though, Jordan massages the viewer's sentimentality like Simone servicing a dim, fond client...
...sets us up to assume that this is his autobiography by creating a fragmented film that the audience can only piece together from the newspaper clips of a few years back. The first scene jumps from Dancer picking up his pipe and freebase right to Dancer looking like a mongrel in the hospital's intensive care unit. Unless we knew exactly what happened to Pryor, we'd have no way of knowing what has happened to Dancer. Freebasing was reputed to be a dangerously potent high prior to Pryor, but it was not a pyromaniac's delight until Pryor went...
Only days before Nunez discovered her, the destitute widow had run out of provisions, and was reduced to sharing a bowl of muddy water with the yellow- haired mongrel that had kept her company for nearly a month. The smoke from ^ her fire, which she had built to ward off mosquitoes and flies, had saved her life. Rescue workers whisked Echeverry to a nearby field hospital, where doctors declared her "amazingly fit, considering her ordeal." She was then transferred to an old people's home. There, her rescuers reported, she was still not sure what all the fuss was about...