Grammar: Adjectives 12

Comedy Caperstraat, Flevoland: absolutely ghastly

I know I won’t like any picture described as “adorable”, or any novel described as “warm”.
Somehow managing to be both twee and vulgar, achingly unfunny, it made the Vicar of Dibley look like Father Ted. (Euan Ferguson finds Mrs Brown’s Boys even worse than expected.)

Here's your yearly reminder that Love Actually is a cinematic abomination without peer. (@davidjmadden)

The awful hamminess of everything. (Peter Bradshaw on Collateral Beauty)

Well this is a profoundly stupid idea of epic proportions. #UK considers plans to halve international #student visas. (‏@ShaziaAwan)

bracingly mean (One well-known actress on another.)

The execrable nadir of It's a Wonderful World. (RI on Louis Armstrong)

Situated in the absolutely ghastly province of Flevoland. (Enes Dedeić)

Easily lost amid frothing madness of Express and cold, sinister creep-towards-fascism of Mail, but this is a new low for Telegraph I think (@jackseale re DT hed: The Judges Versus the People)

He loved the Soho pubs, full of bitter, drunk men in tweed. (Times obit of AA Gill)

lazy decorationism (ML on Hundertwasser. He gets told never to speak of H that way and asks “You mean casually depreciative?”)

It is the spastic twitch-and-pose style that ruined American musicals until...well are we really over it yet? (imdb commenter on Flashdance)

polite make-believe (Andrew Brown II on Iceland’s first pagan temple for 1,000 years)

The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism (@spitalfieldslife)

Those windswept 'cracked' voices with a deliberate complete lack of oomph. (blogger on “breathy voiced” songs in ads)

fussy, busy, fiddly: Gothic architecture

Few things set my teeth on edge more than unreadably forced, over-written whimsy. (@paulwhitelaw)

Patrick Caulfield’s 1968 screenprint Found Objects: on a plain mauve ground, a feeble collection of archaeological finds is set out: a couple of potsherds, half a dozen pebbles, a few twigs. (Brian Dillon, LRB Aug 2016)

Kevin Roberts’ “trademark drivel” (Catherine Bennett on the management theories of Kevin Roberts, sacked chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi. Example: “Ideas have been my mission and thinking round corners my passion”.)

I think this might be the most forlorn photo I've ever taken of the British seaside. (Tom Cox ‏@cox_tom)

Never underestimate the petty spite to which sexism will go. (Kate Long ‏@volewriter  On a quote from an 1890s report about women pottery painters not being allowed to use arm rests, unlike the men.)

vacuous life advice (@ejlflop on Alain de Botton)

Francis Bacon’s biographer, Michael Peppiatt, reviews a book about Bacon’s two close friends, Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, also artists. “Dicky’s painstaking illustrations for the James Bond novels... Denis achieved a certain distinction as a painter of technically adept estuary landscapes... Much of what happened to Dicky and Denis outside Francis’s sphere of influence is mildly interesting...” (They were both much better artists than the bullying, alcoholic, self-aggrandizing Bacon. Bacon was so nasty about Wirth-Miller’s paintings that Wirth-Miller gave up art altogether, and after Bacon’s death said “I don’t want to talk about him ever again. He was an absolutely horrible man.”)

I'm in a field. It is wet. A tent beckons. This is utterly fucking ghastly, why do people go outside? (@paulwhitelaw)

woefully over-stylised direction (Paul Whitelaw)

I was born in '81, so I've lived through almost every second of the dismantling of the radiantly humane postwar settlement. Breaks my heart. (@AlexPaknadel)

Only ten days until half of Britain permanently detests the other half for doing something mindbogglingly senseless. (@diamondgeezer Yup, that happened.)

The bland cast of unknowns are adrift with this material. (Paul Whitelaw on Versailles)

ineffably shallow and meretricious (SL on Peter Greenaway)

Five brainless management fads that desperately need to die

Tragic tomato soup lasagna ... Poppy Cannon’s life outside the kitchen was far more fascinating than her dismal recipes might have suggested.

Flowers: an essentially well-meaning study of clinical depression buried beneath a tiresome mound of self-consciously offbeat bollocks. (@paulwhitelaw)

mushy, sloshy, muzzy colours (Kate Bateman on early Moorcroft)

Gem of incompetence
Derivative and pusillanimous farrago
Ill-conceived piece of sub-porn claptrap
Woeful all-star kaleidoscope
Absurd high-flown bosh
(film buff and critic Leslie Halliwell)

Set to unleash the Three Horsemen of the Dull & Dreadfully Mild Mannered Architectural Apocalypse. Poor old Thamesmead. (Catherine Slessor ‏@cath_slessor)

terrible stabs at comedic relief (imdb commenter)

staggeringly mediocre (new building in Sloane Square)

goofy and cheap-looking (postmodern building)

inane gags (for weak puns)

If you like violent mean-spiritedness and borderline homophobia, then knock yourself out with E4's new sci-fi comedy-drama, The Aliens. (@paulwhitelaw)

On the basis that whoever's irritating hateful spiteful angry wankers on Twitter must be all right, @helenlewis just gets better and better. (@IanMartin)

More here, and links to the rest.