Shades of a rap Frank Capra.A second American, Sean Penn, won the male actor award for his pencil-moustached cocaine-sniffer in Anthony Drazan's "Hurlyburly", based on David Rabe's acidulous play about middle-aged Malibu men between marriages.
Both books make you smile or even laugh, but while Mr Heaney's humour is tongue-in-cheek and twinkling, Mr Fenton's is mordant and even acidulous.
My own starter, the savage-sounding "rice and flesh", turned out to be a fashion-plate of a dish, in which glossy mouthfuls of braised calf tail posed on a luscious, vividly yellow risotto, stippled with saffron and pleasingly acidulous.
Simon Cowell, the acidulous producer turned music critic who dominates the hit show "American Idol," has organized an act called Il Divo, in which trained opera singers bleat pop tunes.
Spacey, after a long career of playing acidulous bad guys, gives a performance of surprising gentleness.
Tudor will be represented by three pieces, including "Jardin aux Lilas," one of his least acidulous ballets — also his greatest — and "The Judgment of Paris," perhaps his nastiest, with three exhausted whores competing for the patronage of a drunk in a bar.
The investigative reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), a close friend of the congressman's, gets on the case and chases the main issue — private security's potential domestic role — while his acidulous editor (Helen Mirren), worried about her newspaper's survival, wants to pursue only the tabloid side of the story.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a saturnine literature professor who specializes in the most acidulous of twentieth-century artists, Bertolt Brecht, and Laura Linney is his kid sister, an unproduced playwright who gets by working temp jobs, stealing from office supply rooms, and hustling for grants.
"The Savages," a lesser affair, but still vital, honest, and engaging, is about a saturnine theatre professor (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who specializes in the most acidulous of twentieth-century artists, Bertolt Brecht, and his kid sister (Laura Linney), an unproduced playwright who gets by with temp jobs, stealing from office supply rooms, and hustling for grants.
This is especially noticeable when — as Halperin writes, in his acidulous final chapter — gay people are "preening themselves on their dullness, commonness, averageness".
Most of all, the choice of Jean Seberg as the lead actress was an overarching reference to Otto Preminger, who had discovered her for his "Saint Joan," and then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of "Bonjour Tristesse".
