Word: cannier
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...musical for the numbers, which are brilliantly conceived and played. Does the milieu seem starched, grandiose, fake? Why, sure. "The whole film is faux," Haynes says, "because everything in glam rock came from somebody else." Goldmine is like a cover recording that's better--certainly cannier, maybe more decadent--than the original...
...father! The physical closeness the man and girl shared, natural when paternal, is now replayed in Anka's mind as an erotic mating dance. Did he feel that way too? she asks him in a love scene of wondrous and creepy intimacy. And is Anka, finally, a cannier actress than we knew...
...positing a government conspiracy with limitless resources, the more fervent believers in the Myth also inoculate themselves against heresy: any concrete evidence the government or anyone else unearths to prove that the crash was strictly terrestrial is obviously engineered--it's a cannier brand of fundamentalism. The appearance of skeptical articles in a national magazine like this one could be part of a disinformation campaign to distract letter-to-the-editor-writing UFOlogists from more fruitful pursuits. For all you know, this author may be a member of an ultra-top-secret National Security Council committee with a terribly spooky...
...best there is in today's bounty of singer-songwriters. But hovering above them, like a gargantuan nightmare kid sister, is the brutal fact of Alanis Morissette, whose primal whining has moved 15 million copies of her first album. It must be a perplexity for Carpenter, whose songs have cannier pop hooks, and for Colvin, whose angst-filled anthems predated and surpassed Morissette's--though she's too polite to scream them...
Clueless has another ancestor in Heathers, the most influential unseen film of the past 10 years. Heathers made the mistake of treating the peer success of blond teenage girls satirically. Amy Heckerling, the writer-director of Clueless, is cannier than that. An able architect of loosey-goosey comedy (she directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Look Who's Talking films), Heckerling wants the viewer to like these girls even as she pokes fun at them. The toughest intellectual challenge for Cher and her friends may be deciphering the Thomas Guide map of Los Angeles streets, but they have...