Even before the Joker goes wild, the director lets loose with some comic horror that owes something to Michael Mann's "Heat," something to Cirque de Soleil, and quickly sets a tense, coiled mood that he sustains for two fast-moving hours of freakish mischief, vigilante justice, philosophical asides and the usual trinkets and toys, before a final half-hour pileup of gunfire and explosions.
This turned out to be another Phoenix performance, a stage-managed stunt he sustained for a year.
Never a man to look on the bright side, he was dubbed "the grumpiest man in pop" and the songs he wrote for the Fall, the band he sustained for more than 40 years, were abrasive and bleak, leavened only by a cynical and sometimes vicious sense of humour as he railed bitterly at the hypocrisies of life and the injustice of the world.
Since then, a different, more realistic complexion has been put on such fables by the horrendous revelation of the Austrian paterfamilias Josef Fritzl and the almost unimaginable menage he sustained for a quarter of a century.Similar stories uncovered elsewhere, including in our own country, have reinforced this feeling.
Ben Gibbard released the album in 2003 before turning his attention back to Death Cab for Cutie, a project he sustained for the next decade.
There he sustains himself by hunting for eggs on a steep rock face.
If Lemelson contines to average twenty patents a year — a pace he has sustained for three decades — he will catch Edison, who is the Hank Aaron of patents, with a thousand and ninety-three, by the time he is ninety-seven.
Not much, however, could make sense of the story of an Indiana man suing the White Sox for an injury he says he sustained lunging for a free T-shirt.
To lose one key forward might be considered a minor irritation but England have now lost three of their foundation stones following news that Lewis Moody will be kept out for up to six weeks by the knee injury he sustained playing for Bath against Aironi last Saturday.
He sustained himself for three years as a vagabond farm-laborer.
He averaged 18.5 points and 7.6 assists, statistics that would place him among the N.B.A.'s top point guards if he sustained them for a full season.
