Word: elfin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Andy Rooney, the elfin curmudgeon of 60 Minutes, usually gripes about quaintly trivial matters like hand soap and junk mail. But in his syndicated newspaper column two weeks ago, he launched an angry attack on a more substantial target: his own bosses. Recent layoffs and the just announced demise of the CBS Morning News, he charged, were symptoms of a growing bottom- line approach to news that is unworthy of a once great network. "CBS, which used to stand for the Columbia Broadcasting System, no longer stands for anything," Rooney wrote. "They're just corporate initials...
...Capra was a master at building social comedy to the apex of hysteria, then pulling a happy-ending miracle out of his hat. Ron Howard, even after Splash and Cocoon, ain't these guys, yet. When he lets his film relax into hip facetiousness, and when Keaton parades his elfin jock swagger, Gung Ho is agreeable. But its relentless stereotyping of the Japanese provokes winces and worse. Its tone swings violently from pratfall to preachment, from an indictment of featherbed laziness to an extended beer-commercial celebration of the mythical American worker. Perhaps the brand of canny moral exuberance that...
Harris plays the phoniest, deadliest and most seductive figure in the clan, fluttering her eyelashes and flinging her hands up in merry confusion every time she gives another derailing shove to the rules of common courtesy. Her monstrous misbehavior is accompanied by an elfin, confessional grin calculated to excuse a multitude of sins. As her novelist husband, Roy Dotrice uses dottiness as an excuse for complete indifference to those around him: at teatime he fills and sips from cup after cup until he is surrounded by soiled china, then passes tea and edibles to each member of his family while...
Meanwhile, Georgetown was terrorizing St. John's, for the third straight time, 77-59. As wisps of point-shaving memories blow north from Louisiana, this has been a nostalgic season for college basketball in New York City. The local papers have clutched elfin Coach Lou Carnesecca adoringly to their breast, and more than one national organization has concluded that freckle- faced Guard Chris Mullin is the finest player in the country. He won the John Wooden player-of-the-year award, but it would probably be best if nobody asks UCLA's old coach his opinion. Of 148 sportswriters...
Sandrine Bonnaire has a peasant sensuality; naked, she looks like the figurehead on a pirate ship. The camera closes in on the stolid planes of her face, and voilà a deep dimple appears incongruously in her left cheek. From wanton to elfin in the flick of an adolescent whim-such are the compelling mysteries of personality. Bonnaire stars as the teen-age Suzanne in this doggedly unsentimental French film from Writer-Director Maurice Pialat. Suzanne's family has stayed together by corseting all hostilities. Then she discovers the power of her own erotic impulse. Overnight, Daddy...