"Sharp Objects" instead relies on internal drama and a transfixing Ms. Adams, who lays Camille's ragged soul bare with sardonicism and self-loathing.
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Its overarching tone is calibrated sardonicism, an approach that is most evident in the serene, once-upon-a-time narration from an offscreen Willem Dafoe.
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Indeed, notwithstanding a notably bumpy opening stretch, I've never before seen a London staging of "Threepenny" that came so naturally by the sour sardonicism of this collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill from 1928.
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Let's go back a few years to a Barron's cover that generated all manner of hate, dismissal, schadenfreude, snark, sarcasm and sardonicism: Yes, it's a bull on a goddamn pogo stick, vaulting over a bear.
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But neither her script nor Yew's production — which features period-defining costumes by Linda Cho and lighting by David Weiner — can comfortably reconcile the radical shifts in style and mood, between the bright sardonicism of Duch's speeches to the audience and the furrowed-brow sincerity of the father-daughter scenes.
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Mr Gilbert is a misanthropic, sarcastic and bitter, using his wit and sardonicism to mock and bully the children that he as head of year should look after. Physically, Mr Gilbert is a looming figure which helps him to intimidate others. Will describes him as a “lunatic giant”. He makes his hatred of his job and his students known.
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Whitehead added that Rockstar's ability to use the "most played- out and over-exposed cultural meme" in their "epic Western" without the product appearing silly or gimmicky was a testament to their design acumen. For instance, a talk with Sasquatch was both absurd and poignant. The expansion's script, he wrote, understood the spirit of its characters and balanced sardonicism and honest pathos. Whitehead felt that its nuanced treatment of John Marston made him "one of gaming's great characters".
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At an individual level, it was essentially unanimous in the Iberian peninsula to prefer death before captivity, disarmament and slavery. As a last resource, warriors would carry a phial containing poison extracted from either hemlock or ranunculus, which they would use to commit suicide if captured. The second poison had also a psychological effect on their enemies, as the user would suffer a postmortem contraction of the facial muscles (sardonicism) and would make it look like the dead warrior was supernaturally laughing at them. Through less exotic means, it was also common seeking death by attacking their captors, or killing each other while imprisoned.
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The acknowledged master of this genre was the late Donald E. Westlake. In spite of adhering to most of the informal rules of this genre, however, which include alternating comedy with scenes of dramatic tension and suspense and always building towards a powerful and surprising climax, Condon ends up thumbing his nose at most of these conventions and, for the last third of the book, it is clearly out-and-out tragedy that he is writing rather than comedy or straight entertainment. By then it has become apparent that, throughout the book, he has been writing about the human condition and its perils rather than merely regaling the reader with the story of an outrageous theft, no matter how ingenious its details. With this initial novel, Condon clearly laid out the parameters for his next 24: a fast-moving, mostly tongue-in-cheek, semi-thriller narrative aimed at the general reader, peppered with occasional moments of grotesque horror and violence, all recounted by an omniscient narrator with a keen sense of irony and sardonicism, and always overlaid, to a greater or lesser degree, by Condon's very deeply felt attitudes about America, business, money, greed, ethics, and morality.
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