Word: naif
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...that the Germans would be outraged that an American flapper was playing their Lulu, a character that was nearly a national icon. (Imagine the flap in Britain if this were announced: Brad Pitt is James Bond.) But they couldn't resist Brooks' fresh approach, which painted Lulu as a naif with bad taste in beaux. A carnal Candide, a blithe arsonist of men's hearts, she has no calculation in her, just a knowing or beckoning smile. Her face makes a kind of smile when she's crying too, as if even the pain a man can inflict...
...understands that a movie company working in the Third World is a colonial microcosm. Its technology is imperious in its imperatives; its largesse inevitably provokes all sorts of mutually exploitative muddles with the locals. This is a valid, if modest, insight, and Gray projects himself agreeably as a rational naif. But The Killing Fields took up themes far transcending show-biz silliness. It was about the 1975 fall of America's Cambodian client state to the genocidal revolutionaries of the Khmer Rouge. Gray's attempt to deal wryly with themes on this scale finally fails. His is a dispassionate sensibility...
...Penumbra Theater Company) developed a realistic style laced with melodious dialogue inspired by the early blues songs he loved. He was influenced by the work of playwright Ed Bullins--who showed him that "you could put black folks on stage as black folks"--but was pretty much a theatrical naif. He hadn't read Shakespeare (except for The Merchant of Venice in school) or Tennessee Williams or virtually any of the other modern American classics. There was some calculation there. When he started writing poetry, Wilson immersed himself in poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas...
Given the two roles she has assayed on TV--the streetwise naif Adriana on The Sopranos and the tough-tawking Gina, the hairdresser sister of Matt LeBlanc's character on Joey--Drea de Matteo in person is shocking. No cleavage-baring tank top, no 2-in. fingernails, no gum cracking...
...faces as he does baseball caps, but the model American wears the placid, loose-jawed countenance of Ben Franklin, Ur-republican. He stands in stark contrast to his sanctimonious and chauvinistic and mercantile countrymen, a model of what the French like most in their Americans: a skeptical, subtle faux naif with a sense of humor and a taste for culture and a deep appreciation for the supremacy of France...