Sentence examples for dead earnest from inspiring English sources

"You know, he was asking himself a dead earnest question.

The narrative turn is both exuberantly postmodern and in dead earnest, questioning the use of suffering as an aesthetic device.

It was "a war between the old and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization... and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield".

Looking at the screen of a handheld!" As the night progressed, however, he found that his little joke was being heard dead earnest.

And like much else taken on by Mr. Hawke, a former movie heartthrob and Gen X hood ornament who is now a 42-year-old father of four, it would seem pretentious if it weren't done in dead earnest.

Contrasting deliberately artificial visuals (in the style of 1950s Technicolor Hollywood melodramas) with dead earnest emotions, Mr. Almodóvar's film exuded, hilariously but hauntingly, the heightened passions we associate with opera.

He sets great store by the expressions "as if" and "not quite", and quotes Thomas Mann's words about artistic seriousness being "dead-earnest playing".

Although Providence has a noise-rock loft scene, the Low Anthem ended up working the quiet side of the street, coming up with a dead-earnest sound that lacks any overt recognition of the modern world.

But what made him an exception was that he — his name eludes my memory — was an insubordinate: he refused to take part in rifle drill; worse still, he refused to take butt or barrel in hand; and, worst of all, when our dead-earnest drill instructor pressed the carbine on him, he would drop it.

It's a dead-earnest debate among intellectuals, environmentalists and government planners, prompted by the steep Japanese population decline projected to begin by 2007.

Though ably acted and indisputably on the side of the angels, "Suffragette" as directed by Sarah Gavron is more dead-on earnest and schematic than it needs to be.