Word: mordantly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Veterans Experience Theater Company in New York City. T.J. Anderson, Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is working on an opera called Soldier Boy, Soldier, about the readjustment problems of a black Viet Nam vet. A San Francisco veteran named Tad Foster has come forth with a mordant collection of cartoons called The Viet Nam Funny Book. The Viet Nam War is even, finally, good for laughs...
Throughout, Galbraith is as laconic as an Ontario plow jockey. He offers little about his private life; his wit is a bit too mechanical, as are mordant observations like "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." Yet Galbraith's air of detachment is satisfying. It enables him to place himself in recent history without seeming more or less important than he was. He is one of the few contemporary memoirists who have held the line on inflation...
...observes Biographer William McFeely with mordant pragmatism, "is a way out of a leather store." Certainly it was that for Ulysses S. Grant, who was clerking in a family shop in Galena, Ill., when the Civil War ignited the U.S. Grant was 38 when the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, and he had distinguished himself only briefly as a soldier: in combat, as an eager young West Pointer in the Mexican War, and as an enterprising peacetime quartermaster who led a hapless party of California-bound travelers across the Isthmus of Panama...
...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...