Word: mordant
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...Gianni Schicchi turns on the engaging protagonist, a wily peasant who thwarts the rapacious Donati, a family of Florentine landowners, in order to provide his daughter and her lover with the money they need to wed. All of the opera's characters are sharply delineated, with a delicate but mordant touch of satire--the greedy relatives (the Donati), the starry-eyed lover (Rinuccio), and the resourceful swindler (Schicchi...
...numerous political setbacks are nightmarish and ongoing. He has experienced-- and somehow survived--more make-or-break moments in two years than most Presidents do in four. The repudiation in the polls last November was as thorough as any President has ever suffered at mid-term, leading to mordant jokes around Washington that Clinton has become the country's first half-term President. Though the White House released a 16-page list of accomplishments last week, the public gives him little or no credit for any of it. That baffles Clinton, who often notes privately, ``If you'd told...
Just after announcing that he was retiring his daily syndicated cartoon, Gary Larson brought his mordant wit to TV for the first time in this weird, wordless animated special. Highlight: a sentimental wolf weeps over home movies. Unearthly and wonderful...
...same time, Turbulent Indigo is weighted heavily with the conviction that the world has snapped its moorings. Moody and mordant, its 10 songs evoke smog-choked vistas, the scourge of aids and the bloodless wounds of love -- all presented as symptoms of a universal malaise. On Sex Kills, sirens echo ominously behind an insistent beat as Mitchell sings, "The ulcerated ozone/ These tumors of the skin/ This hostile sun beatin' down on/ This massive mess we're in! ... And sex sells everything/ And sex kills." The album title, Mitchell says, "refers to the turbulent blues of this warring, frenzied climate...
Well, not quite everybody. For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life. And it seems not to realize that Harry is less a hero than a wife-abusing goon...