Word: self
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...raised in India, Maurice at 13 came under the tutelage of a cross-eyed swami (Ben Kingsley, giving the goose to his Oscar-winning Gandhi). "I want to become a guru so people will like me," young Maurice tells his master, "so I will love myself." I find such self-knowledge, not to mention self-absorption, appealing in the nakedness of its need...
...only accidentally so. That's why we identify with him; if he is one of us, we know perfectly well that we wouldn't last a minute against all those men in black wielding highly advanced weaponry. In that spirit of genial fantasy, we permit out surrogate that utter self-confidence, that sublime sangfroid, with which with he cheerfully motors his way around and through disaster. He's what we would be - in our dreams - if we had any luck...
...There was a lot of this peculiar energy in the characters portrayed by the great silent comedians. And there was a lot of it in Maxwell Smart, the doofus, inanely self-confident secret agent Don Adams played in Get Smart, the iconic 1960s television series in which Mel Brooks and Buck Henry started satirizing James Bond almost before he made his first smirking wisecrack to Miss Moneypenny. One dared wanly to hope that the loose, slightly impoverished air of that funny, curiously memorable little enterprise might somehow prevail in our era of more grandiose imagery...
...half century ago. For all I know, it was not as funny as we thought it was back in those less megalomaniac times. But Charlie Chaplin used to say that all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a policeman, a pretty girl and his divinely innocent self. Of course, he was touched by genius and the people who make movies like Get Smart are touched by no more than the unwise desire to spend someone else's money on special effects that are inherently antithetical to the antic. The phrase someone ought to be whispering in their...
...some accounts, a total of 440,000 people have been rounded up under the emergency, with less than a quarter still detained. Journalists formally complained a month ago of a clampdown on press freedoms: some TV talk shows have been suspended, while more than a few editors are practicing self-censorship after receiving communiqués from military intelligence. "Everywhere you look there are watchmen outside your door," says Adilur Rahman Khan, member of Odhikar, an outspoken human-rights group. "Just open your mouth and you're liable to be jailed," says Khondkar Delwar Hussain, secretary general...