Word: cleverisms
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...coffin" since the Japanese invented synthetic blood (sold as Tru Blood [sic], in six-packs). Humans are skeptical that they've really been taken off the menu--antivamp hate crimes abound--but they're also fascinated. There's a subculture of "fangbangers" who crave vampire sex, and in a clever inversion, a brisk trade in "v," vampire blood, which intensifies the senses and acts like extra-strength Viagra...
Sittenfeld's triumph that we do. Charlie is a puerile, self-absorbed innocent but not unkind. (Alice would never tolerate that.) He is an excellent father and a faithful husband; the pure pleasure of his company overwhelms Alice's need to punish herself for her lethal mistake. He is clever and insightful - his emotional intelligence beggars his intellect - and blithely uninformed. His strengths are every bit as apparent as his weaknesses...
...threadbare - there is only one bathroom, with iffy plumbing, at Halcyon for the truckload of Blackwell siblings. They're bawdy for effect (but prudish in reality), overly familiar, competitive to the point of insanity. Alice, of course, imagines that the Blackwells figure her for a gold digger. "What a clever girl you are!" Maj says when Alice blurts out the news of her and Charlie's engagement...
...close to an answer as you'll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay in the cocoon of ignorance most of us live in. It pushes the old form of movie comedy - smart people saying clever things - into collision with today's dominant model of slackers whose utterly unfounded egotism eventually worms its way into an audience's indulgence. Which is to say that most of the people here seem like bright lights but are actually dim bulbs. They're not falling-down stupid; they radiate the subtler variety of idiocy that can be mistaken for charm...
Wall Street thinks Stitzer can do it. In the first half of 2008, sales (unadjusted for currency) rose 14%, to $5.27 billion. Cadbury's clever drumming-gorilla ads helped too. Morgan Stanley said in a recent report that "unlike with many other consumer stocks, we expect Cadbury's earnings growth to accelerate." Says David Morris, food and beverage research director at Mintel International Group, a market-research company: "The spin-off is a smart move. Investors had felt these businesses weren't getting their appropriate valuations when they were combined." As stand-alones, they can also grow by attracting merger...