Word: mordant
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...Cort's Max, while as wide-eyed and clumsy as Buster Keaton, fails to add the vibrant punch that his mordant Harold could not escape. Nor does love interest Samantha Eggar provide anything more than good, solid acting...
...DePalma has always submerged his stories under a torrent of extravagant stylistic effects, ditching Hitchcock's logic, his psychological insight, his mooring in the specific tension and atmosphere of a given situation or place. He shares Hitchcock's cynicism about human relations, but he has none of the sly, mordant perception that makes this cynicism persuasive and disquieting. In Dressed to Kill he dispenses with Psycho's emotional complications and seizes on Hitchcock's technique--subjective camerawork, sudden high-angle shots, the portentous close-up--so that the horror, and the style by which it's conveyed, become the core...
...novel The Public Burning, Robert Coover satirized the myth from the mordant angle of Watergate America: "Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas, false starts and sudden brainstorms, erratic bursts of passion and apathy, brief setbacks and partial victories, is later discovered to be-in the light of America's gradual unveiling as the New Athens, New Rome and New Jerusalem all in one -an inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code...
...grip old people. The subject is worthwhile, but Brest never comes close to giving it either tragic or comic life. Except for the funny holdup and a brief subsequent Vegas gambling spree, Going in Style has only dull, homely sequences that alternately patronize and sentimentalize the aged. The mordant humor of Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa? and the fiery compassion of Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto are nowhere to be found...
...resembled a dapper cross between Groucho Marx and Rudyard Kipling; the same dark, emphatic brows, bristle-broom mustache, prognathic jaw and mordant cast of eye behind steel-rimmed glasses. But when he described himself, there was no mistaking the original style of the most literate, widely traveled humorist of his time: "Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled...