Grammar: Adjectives 15

Don't listen to people who tell you to cut out all adjectives. They probably mean imprecise descriptors like "nice", "sumptuous" or "key".  (And how could I say that without using the adjective "imprecise"?)

The thrillingly unnerving Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, Raimund Abraham, 1992-2002. (Pictured. @Furmadamadam)

New planning rules permit the addition of two storeys: "Neighbours will not be able to formally object", it says here. Who thought this one up? Anyone with experience of local representation can imagine the understandably livid residents this will produce in volumes. All the hallmarks of some cracking wheeze from an Oil-funded Think Tank whose denizens have never slogged in neighbourhood politics. Is this truly dreadful idea going to be watered down? (@BrynleyHeaven)

One of those fairly awful movies about teenagers and pop singers/groups. (via Facebook)

The tower of St Benet Fink church is disappointingly feeble. (JP)

Luigi's pin-table business is delightfully dingy, filled out with slot machines and macabre looking games such as a laughing sailor or Konki The Clown: Fortune Teller. (Imdb on Street of Shadows)

Outlandishly banal, numbingly tedious, completely devoid of stylistic flair; plodding, matter-of-fact prose; either a postmodern master or a talentless nobody. (Critics on Sylvia Smith’s mesmerising memoir Misadventures)
Absurd court send-up The Favourite. (Adrian Horton in the Guardian. The recent film was about Queen Anne, but with swearing and pop music, and everybody thought it was wonderful.)

A toweringly silly piece of modern art has been delighting locals since the 1980s. (atlasobscura.com)

An irritating slushy pop ballad, one of those dreary songs that often turned up in these type of movies, sung by nondescript singer Ronny Hall. (Imdb on Pit of Darkness)

“5G caused Coronavirus” is a “particularly deranged theory”, says @ruskin147.

It’s cool that the resources the markets seem to allocate most efficiently and expeditiously are misery, pestilence, and death. Truly amazing - and a fundamental rebuttal of every dime store TED Talk scientism progressivist grift - that as markets wreak carnage the laziest and wealthiest people on earth demand the proles reverse thru sheer will and self-sacrifice the second great depression in two weeks. (@PatBlanchfield)

I can’t picture what a 23-stone chandelier might look like, although the short answer is probably “vulgar”. (Hilary Rose, Times March 2020)

As you can tell from my clearly blithering attempt to ruin the plot, it's a fantastic film. (imdb on Double Indemnity)

I wrote about the Trumps' majestically cursed Christmas videos as a window into their unique cheesy joylessness. (@david_j_roth newrepublic.com)

I also had to listen to unbelievable amounts of inane prattle by the extreme feminists about how I was letting down the side and how I was under the heel of the patriarchy for being able to sew. They also disdained my ability to cook especially when I revealed that my Father taught me - they didn't see any of it as life skills, they saw it all as repression. (CL)

The mind-improving meetings of the prim societies he belonged to. (Alida Baxter, Flat on My Back, on exciting dates with a former boyfriend)

In a history full of splitting hairs and infuriatingly pointless in-fighting, Spinoza is, for my money, the book’s hero. (New Humanist on John Barton’s A History of the Bible)

Le Creuset: ridiculously heavy over-rated cooking utensils (CS)

This story certainly needs telling, but I wish the director hadn't opted for quite such a gratingly shouty and melodramatic acting style. (@PlanetSlade)

A group of people who clearly share his view that it’s rather fun to be royal are the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, otherwise known as The Royal Bastards. Membership of this 58-year-old society, based in Cupertino, California, is open to individuals of any nationality who can prove descent from an illegitimate son or daughter of a king of England, Scotland, Wales, Great Britain or the United Kingdom. “Please note that most lineages acceptable for admission to other hereditary associations will not quality for admission to this society,” it rather snootily insists. (Daily Express, 2009)

I didn't crop photo as the dismal bricks add to the ambience. (Via FB)

I've requested that my body be cremated, then my ashes put upon a small Viking longboat toy. The viking longboat toy is to be pushed out into a small boating lake, or similarly disappointing body of water, and set alight. (@LatestMessiah)

Undergraduate gibberish – not since first-year history of art seminars have I heard so much self-indulgent academic flannel. (Times 2019 on Karl Ove Knausgard)

The still (rather desperately) swinging London of 1972... (Fortean Times 2019)

Terribly well-meaning teachers with bright-eyed mantras about tolerance and respect... (Times)

Winning silliness and genuine unease. (Matthew Sweet on The Devil Rides Out. He adds that “dabbling” in anything is so much worse than doing it properly.)

He manages to be a reptilian sleazeball throughout the entire film. (Critic on Vincent Price in Laura)

Mystical mumbo jumbo. For a while they even took to wafting about in robes. (Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times on late 19th century French art group Les Nabis)

There's none of that watered-down Freudian guff we encounter in Psycho. (Henry Coombs on Peeping Tom)

Nietzsche’s life was rivetingly odd. (Hugo Rifkind, Times)

Postmodern wiseass. (CE on Cumberbatch’s Sherlock)

The film goes thoroughly and delectably bananas. (film.avclub.com)

Loughborough Junction is a bit of London that would like to imagine itself as the edge of somewhere nicer, but Stella Duffy relishes its tatty ordinariness. (Blurb for Duffy’s The Room of Lost Things)

More here, and links to the rest.