Word: cleverisms
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...however, that Sleepless in Seattle is too smart for its own good. For clever as it is conceptually, it violates the most basic rule of romantic- comedy construction. If boy doesn't meet girl, then the drama of boy losing girl and the final satisfaction of boy getting girl cannot happen. The complications in this movie are all logistical. They are never confrontational, as they so giddily were in the classic comedies of muddled love, the spirit of which co-writer and director Nora Ephron has said she wanted to recapture...
...method Mitch uses to solve his dilemma is also much more plausible--and clever. As in the book, he plays both sides off each other. In the movie, however, the gravity of the consequences of full cooperation with the FBI--disbarment, career termination, etc.--are much more vivid, and Mitch's determination to follow his oath as a lawyer while getting free of the firm is powerfully portrayed...
Regardless, those of us who support lifting the ban should applaud his use of the Powell invitation to spur on the Faculty and student protesters, even if clever subterfug isn't really Rudenstine's game...
Abakanowicz, 63, has a huge talent. Her work draws on deep wells of feeling, myth and metaphor. Its images strike to the heart, not in any sentimental way, but equally without any of the clever-clever flittering of Postmodernism. Some of her sculpture has a strong political undercurrent, not in the feeble, travestied sense of much current "political art," but in a deeper level of articulation: "My whole life," she once remarked, "has been formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds, mass hatred and mass worship." To have lived in Poland through the successive waves...
...that it's largely in our hands to control the outcome. Focus, discipline, a stronger White House staff can help us, but everyone knows how the bottom line will be measured. It's the condition of the collective pocketbook on Election Day that counts." And no matter how clever a politician is, there is simply no way to spin a sense of economic well-being into an empty wallet...