Word: scabrously
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...arrests, car accidents, fires and such from the night before. In the mid-'30s he became a free-lancer. Equipped with a police-radio scanner in his car and the most wonderfully named of all old cameras, the Speed Graphic, he chased down the city at its most scabrous, a place where the chief pastimes were groping and bloodletting and where the main thing to remember was that only the strong survive. Eventually he was also a contributor to the liberal daily PM, which put him in the company of literary tough customers like Dorothy Parker and Dashiell Hammett...
...Renton delivers his "Choose life" speech--the film is a nonstop visual and aural assault. Slo-mo, fast-mo, a hallucinogenic editing pace and the thick music of Scottish accents mean that you'll have to cram for Trainspotting. Attention must be paid, and will be rewarded with the scabrous savor of the movie's lightning intelligence. The subject is heroin, but the style is speed. This film is an upper--a jolt of pure movie energy...
...wasn't a Pop artist; there was nothing benign or accommodating in his view of mass culture. To him the TV set was both America's anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, working in a real-things-in-the-real-world vernacular that was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical and morally obsessed. Compared with the thin, overconceptualized gruel that most political art in postmodern America has become--the stuff the Whitney normally favors--Kienholz was red meat all the way. Which doesn't mean that his output was uniformly good. An item like The Ozymandias Parade...
...film of Richard III, offers a cleverer twist on the orgasmic affinity of love and death than any devised by Eszterhas for Basic Instinct. It has the added jolt of literary blasphemy, like hearing a Tupac Shakur lyric sung in Westminster Abbey. Melodrama in Shakespeare? How awful, how scabrous, how very...appropriate, since Will was a man of the theater who gloried in the trappings of stage sensation. And because Richard III and Iago are the two scurviest, most seductive villains in the canon, it is right for directors to find a movie equivalent, in images and action, for Shakespeare...
...THEATER by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin) explores the beginnings of geezerhood (Roth's resolutely obnoxious hero, Mickey Sabbath, is a randy 64) with some of the same comic sexual energy that set readers goggling in Portnoy's Complaint. Sabbath is an ex-puppeteer whose present occupation is perfecting his scabrous personality. As he searches his disorderly past for meaning, largely without success, he is an equal-opportunity boor, richly offensive to women, men, Jews and Gentiles. Yet the result is a brilliantly written character, rampaging through a novel about facing death in a lonely...