Collectively, they tell a story that is part political thriller and part courtroom drama, with moments of Shakespearean grandeur and swerves into stumblebum comedy.
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Most critics denounced him fiercely, not least Hilton Kramer in the New York Times, in an article memorably entitled "A mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum".
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The review's headline, "A Mandarin Pretending To Be A Stumblebum," is so well known that I had been living under the impression that I knew what was in it.
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When they met—Brennan, working as a script editor for Columbia Pictures and Waits, down the hall writing the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart—Waits had exhausted his sentimental stumblebum persona.
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Events came in profusion, leaving us in confusion as to what mattered, what was the most worrisome, and what was rollickingly funny—such as the stumblebum "plumbers," the Nixon White House's otherwise menacing private goon squad who mucked up everything they did.
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In this regard, the hollowest accusation leveled at Guston in Kramer's critique is the one implied in the comparison with Saul Steinberg: Mr. Steinberg is an intellectual, and he has no interest in donning the mask of the stumblebum when he takes up his brush or pencil or rubber stamps.
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But his team's dalliances with Russian oligarchs and his inner circle's dumb attempts to set up a secret line to Putin could still just turn out to be a seamier, cruder, more stumblebum version of the Bush-Saudi links that set Michael Moore and Craig Unger ablaze in the Bush years, or the attempts to woo Tehran and tame the Muslim Brotherhood that persuaded anti-Obama paranoiacs that he was an agent of Shariah.
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" As she points out, some critics would dismiss him as "the bard of the stumblebum," a relic of so-called proletarian fiction, though he was largely influenced by nothing less than the teachings of Christ — timeless, in other words, albeit not so much in midcentury America, where the worst stigma was poverty: "The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all," Algren wrote, "in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.
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It received scathing reviews from most of the art establishment. Memorably, New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer ridiculed Guston's new style in an article entitled "A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum", referring to "mandarin" in the sense of an influential figure and "stumblebum" meaning a clumsy person.
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In Murder Machine, authors Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain described him as a "stumblebum". He did not suffer from dyslexia like his older brother, but was thought to be considerably less acute. He managed to successfully manage a Flatlands, Brooklyn automotive repair shop on Glenwood Road in Flatlands located directly around the corner from his brother's gasoline station, body shop and auto repair center. While his brother Frederick was offbeat with his eccentricities and idiosyncrasies but competent, Richard DiNome was a "whining bumbler".
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Betty Clarke of The Guardian wrote that Title TK is "a welcome return to punky pop that knows how to flex some melodic muscle", and singled out the isolation of different sounds as the best aspect of the album. Similarly, NMEs John Robinson lauded the distinctive character of the drums, guitar, and vocals. Other positive commentary included praise for Albini's influence on the album's sound (PopMatterss Matt Cibula), and for the album's quirky appeal (Billboard critic Brian Garrity). In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau called the music "skeletal, fragmented, stumblebum", and applauded Kim and Kelley Deal's tuneful songwriting.
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He criticized Hardy's performance as acting like "a stumblebum Method goof", and felt the film spent too long on Venom's origin story when it should have been what a sequel likely will be. He added that the film may not be as bad a start to a new shared universe as The Mummy (2017), but it "could turn out to be a similar case of a franchise kickoff that doesn't fully attain franchise liftoff". Ty Burr of The Boston Globe scored the film one and a half stars and said it "saps the life force of almost everyone in it" including Hardy, Williams, and Ahmed whose performances he all criticized. He also criticized Fleischer's direction as "unfocused" and Libatique's cinematography as some of the "dingiest" of 2018, but did feel that the scenes where Hardy and Venom talk while sharing a body were "reasonably amusing".
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