Word: stingingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bruce and Sting sing for liberty; France stays left; one result of a terrible accident...
...mood suffused Potter's 1978 BBC serial, Pennies from Heaven (in which Bob Hoskins played the music salesman), his 1982 film, Brimstone and Treacle (with Sting as the satanic young man), and the current Track 29 (starring Theresa Russell as the American wife). In October his novel Blackeyes (about the plagiarizing novelist) was published, to acclaim, in the U.S., and last month the BBC aired his new series, Christabel, a domestic drama set in '40s Germany. Masterpiece Theatre will show the series in February...
...this, as Chandler well knew. It was no coincidence that he called his first detective "Mallory." Chandler identified all too closely with his "shop- soiled Galahad," struggling to maintain a code of honor in a Hollywood that had never heard of the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Chandler knew the sting of being typecast as a small-time operator ("The better you write a mystery," he complained, "the more clearly you demonstrate that the mystery is not really worth writing"). Yet what he knew most of all, as one of Hollywood's great theoreticians, was that a writer cannot afford...
...course, the only thing worse than copping the sincere attitude (and in the case of U2 I don't doubt it started out sincere and was eventually co-opted by the forces of commerce) is having an attitude. Enough with Sting's image as the politically correct artiste extraordinare who can rock out with the boys, jam with Black jazz musicians, do the classical thespian thing, father a host of love children and be just the eccentric country gentleman donating his time and energy to worthy causes. I mean, aren't we bohemian? Gimme a break...
That power finally sweeps away one's resistance to the film's major improbability. It asks us to believe that the FBI, in those days still under J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorship, would have mounted an elaborate sting operation to bring the murderers at last to some rough justice under federal anticonspiracy statutes. That seems unlikely, especially given Hoover's hatred of Martin Luther King and his allies. Still, narrow historical criticism somehow seems irrelevant to a movie that so powerfully reanimates the past for the best of reasons: to inform the spirit of today and possibly tomorrow...