Even though it has beer bongs and breasts, it is, in its own peculiar, incomplete way, a very earnest work.
Though etched in acidic repartee, it is an earnest work, a tale of moral reckoning for the pompous Hugo Latymer Mr. Whiteheadd).
The book she and Mr. Torode wrote two years into their marriage is quite short and quite sweet, an earnest work whose hopefulness one badly wants to share.
H.H. Munro ("Saki"), in The Unbearable Bassington (1912), an exquisite novel of manners, says more of the nature of Edwardian society than many a more earnest work.
Molly Haskell provides that defense in "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited," an earnest work of moviegoer remembrance that's also affectionate scholarship.
Historical fiction tends to be a challenge for naturalistic stage dramatization, and this earnest work, commissioned by the Irish Rep, has the overstuffed, page-bound feel of a by-the-numbers mini-series.
When he retired in 2000, he began pursuing his automotive interests in earnest, working his way through a pair of Mercedes 300SLs, assorted Bentleys, a 1955 Maserati A6G/54 2000 Spyder and several Ferraris.
"This is the product of a lot of really hard, earnest work on this policy," said Karl Zinsmeister, a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush who helped develop the initiative.
It's a lesson that Timothy Nolan could benefit from in his new drama, "Wrong Barbarians," a thuddingly earnest work about a subject -- how the news media and the government have created a culture of fear after Sept. 11 -- that has been covered with more cleverness and insight by others (including Mr. Moore).
She later appeared in "With Bated Breathe" (the title's odd spelling was not explained), in which, dressed in a black shift, she did a lot of earnest work with a chair and quite a bit of opaque gesturing to Chopin, ending, inexplicably, with a headstand.
