Word: tinsel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SATURDAY: Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) Early and influential Bergman...
Although it uses the same title, Lady Sings the Blues has practically no other resemblance to the gusty Holiday autobiography published in 1956, three years before she died. The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial...
...deadpan-absurdist humor, and brute suspense. Names, conversations, non-sequitur events become progressively more other-worldly (sub-rather than sur-real) and the concatenations of bewildering vignettes are glued together only by the reader's curiosity. But all the while, DeLillo demonstrates his golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese, and many of his dialogues skewer perfectly the soft spots in academic double-talk, adolescent vagueness, the jargon of nuclear warfare (as in Herman Kahn's own book of the dead. On Thermonuclear War), public relations yes-speak, and the excruciatingly serious military-religious language of dedicated football...
Right now, about 75% of a presidential campaign is hoopla, manufactured movement and entertainment designed to bedazzle. Substance, and there is some, is largely buried and ignored in the rush of the jets, the bands, rallies and booze. Ensnared in all this tinsel, the candidates come up with ridiculous pledges, like the one about setting foot in all 50 states (Nixon in 1960). That is an exercise in locomotion, not intelligence. Rushing madly along the trail, looking over their shoulders at the pursuers and scared to death of making misstatements in the blur, the men have tended in recent years...
Superstar is truly anti-Jewish, but worse, it is antiChrist. Your criticism is terribly kind to a contrivance that exploits for profit the very heart and soul of our Christian belief with this very shallow interpretation, covered over with neon, tinsel and noise...