Word: shrewd
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Witness to the Execution (airing Sunday, Feb. 13) is not flawless, but it is a shrewd and timely examination of TV sensationalism, which is not the same thing as being sensational. Jessica Traynor (Sean Young), the top program executive for Tycom Entertainment, a pay-per-view operation "somewhere in a 500-channel television universe," is searching for a blockbuster programming event. "We're in trouble, Jess," says her boss (Len Cariou). "Movies don't work; screen's still too small. Sports is dying. The sex boom is over. Where the hell are we going...
Frank Zappa surely would have appreciated -- indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short...
...Todd Whitman, declared quite openly that he had used $500,000 to pay off Black ministers in New Jersey so they wouldn't press their congregations to the polls. If Rollins had been enjoying bacon and eggs at home and talking privately to his wife about his shenanigans, some shrewd investigative reporting might have unearthed the story. But Rollins was in Washington D.C., and he was eating with a gaggle of journalists at a public occasion when he casually revealed his plot...
...course, the liberal use of these expensive lures is nothing new; municipalities are often willing to offer everything but the mayor's office to keep businesses, often quite healthy ones at that, in a given city (or state, as the case may be). This if often a shrewd manuever on the part of government officials. Bargaining away certain financial incentives brings greater returns as long as the following assumption holds true: the business in question will bring (or keep) significant economic activity to the city that the city otherwise would not enjoy...
...Humbert (James Mason), a French professor who has come to New Hampshire to lodge for the summer before starting a lectureship, tours the home of prospective landlord Charlotte Haze (Sue Lyons), he is completely turned off by her blatant, grotesque and clingy personality. But one look at Haze's shrewd, sexy adolescent daughter, Dolores (a.k.a. Lo or Lolita, played by Shelley Winters), sensuously sunbathing on the front lawn, and Humbert is there to stay. The story plays out Humbert's pedophilic passions, and, when Lolita and he go on a cross-country escapade, it becomes an extended commentary...