Word: shrewder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While it looked as though he went after Blumenthal to defend the honor of the independent counsel's colleagues, there was actually a prosecutorial purpose as well, the shrewder minds at the White House quickly realized. "We don't think it's because Ken Starr is so thin-skinned he can't take a little criticism," said press secretary Mike McCurry. "This is an exercise about something else." The maligning of his staff looked to Starr like the work of professionals. In that light, the dirt digging provided him with an opportunity: Blumenthal and private investigator Terry Lenzner, also subpoenaed...
Love and War is shrewder and funnier, but its therapy-session psychologizing tends to run amuck. Wally and Jack, the couple from opposite sides of the tracks, dissect their relationship in first-person comments to the camera. (He: "I have this feeling about her. It's like the first time I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. I was strangely excited, and a little nauseous at the same time." She: "I've always found his type very attractive, but I'm in a dangerously vulnerable place right now.") Conversing with each other, however, they revert to adolescent stammering. Jack tries...
Screenwriter James Toback, who has sometimes tended to the prolix and the pretentious, is all business here -- much of it very funny business. The man writes dialogue as if it had not gone out of style. Transforming the hearsay history of a gangster's life into something shrewder than a mere morality tale, yet more disciplined than a romantic celebration of outlaw heroism, he keeps reminding us that back in Bugsy's day, the mark of a good screenplay was great wordplay...
...erstwhile Soviet standards, outright dangerous. It portrays Lenin as a fallible man, not a mythic hero. It admits that the Bolsheviks were detested by many of the peasants they purported to help. And the play commits the once unpardonable sin of bringing Trotsky onstage -- showing him, in fact, as shrewder than Lenin. The theme is ideological purity vs. practical necessity, with pragmatism favored all the way. Compromise with the West is extolled as sensible; worldwide revolution is dismissed as a daydream...
...series of the late '60s and early '70s. In fact, he is that Dan Rowan. But before we ask what he is doing in such bookish company, it should be noted that he put in his time as a comedy writer, and that he knocks out a sharper, shrewder letter than one would ever expect from a former headliner on the Vegas strip (except for Noel Coward, of course...