Word: clever
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Through the use of clever props and staging devices (e.g. puppet/human interaction a la Mr. Rogers) the production sustained momentum through occasional stretches of dauntingly historical material...
...decide whether to bring Aeschylus of Euripedes to Athens, Dionysius stages a competition to "weight" the merits of their poetry. Many had puns ensue. The clever Euripedes is too "light;" the more philosophical Aeschylus literally tips the scales with the heavy line: "Chariot on chariot, corpse on corpse was piled." Literary theorists theorists today could stand to learn a great deal from this Dionysian, beer-in-webbed-hand approach to criticism...
...superficial. Perhaps this is somewhat intentional. Indiana often slips into seemingly unnecessary and indulgent stylisms, which act as nothing more than glittery accessories. Though possibly a reference to the Accessories Decade, these long-winded descriptions (usually of sex, sexy characters, or drugs) come too frequently to be considered merely clever allusions to 80s excess...
...film is more than just a clever satire of media overkill. Ritchie assembles a vivid, sharply drawn gallery of small-town characters: Beau Bridges as Wanda's unwilling co-conspirator, a hardhat burdened with a messy past and a loony wife (Swoosie Kurtz); Elizabeth Ruscio as the rival mom, no less competitive but not as imaginative; and Matt Frewer as Wanda's drudge of a lawyer. All that and a bouncy country score by Lucy Simon too. True or not, it's positively terrific...
...that end, one clever madrileno revised a "KKK" graffito by changing the first K to a Y and consequently rendering the Invisible Empire as YKK, the international zipper concern. The sole defacement of one spiffy Barcelona metro stop declares, "!NAZIS NO!" In the United States we face racial and ethnic problems of our own, but most Americans, I think, avoid responding to far-right sentiment not because they agree with it but because they consider it simply too marginal to merit any attention. Either politically mainstream Spaniards like to vandalize subways, or the sentiment they observe seems to them...