Word: stinging
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...often hopeless." When Fraser expressed these concerns, she sparked charges that she was a "chateau-bottled socialist" who has prospered under the Thatcherism she deplores. In rebuttal, championing the independence of writers, Antonia snaps, "In France they would have given me a medal." She readily acknowledges that personal attacks sting. "Yes. Absolutely. Fair criticism is hurtful; unfair criticism is doubly hurtful." But Lady Antonia is past her Perfect Woman stage. That ended in 1975, when Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter discovered each other. Then came the gossip, the headlines, the charges in divorce court. Five turbulent years later they were...
...agents can be spared because IRS employees are working overtime to contain an explosion of smaller-time money-laundering cases involving car salesmen, ordinary investors, real estate agents and other entrepreneurs. In Florida undercover IRS agents operating a sting operation that they touted as a "full-service financial-investment corporation" have nabbed 50 would-be money launderers in the past year. "Some are lawyers and businessmen who are skimming cash from their businesses, and they've heard about what you can do through an offshore bank," says Tampa IRS supervisor Morris Dittman. "Others have cash that rolls...
There, however, useful invention ends. The narrative Murphy develops out of this situation is less a homage to a vanished genre than a knock-off of two more recent successes -- The Sting and Prizzi's Honor -- that were funny, but in antithetical, unblendable ways. The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old- fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets...
...stars Tyne Daly of TV's Cagney & Lacey in a revival drawn from the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Prince of Central Park, which quickly closed, derived from a book that had also prompted a made-for-TV movie. Brecht's own The Threepenny Opera, featuring rock star Sting as the seductive villain Macheath, is freely filched from British satirist John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. Sad to say, although each show could boast ingenious design and staging or beguiling acting, far from the best writers have been at work...
...with sophisticated detail that is out of character, and enervatingly transforms the last syllable of the second-act finale from a strident long vowel to a swallowed short one. Jocelyn Herbert's cumbersome set obstructs movement, draining energy. But emotion intensifies after a dozy first act. As a singer, Sting needs the help of a recording studio, although he summons at least a shadow of the requisite cavalier charm. The main virtue is Kurt Weill's indestructible score...