Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...which opposites warily circle, passionately and adulterously engage, and ruefully part. Then there's the memory piece, in which a man comes to grips with the dark, dangerous and deeply buried secret of his childhood and by so doing achieves peace and self- reconciliation. There's comedy too: shrewd bumpkin goes to New York City and shows them city slickers a thing or two. Finally, there's a teacher- student relationship that leads to some mutually instructive, emotionally gratifying male bonding...
...visually as Conroy's book is lush verbally. There is something tidal -- that is to say, patiently inexorable -- in its rhythms. And as Tom Wingo, protagonist of all the movies Streisand is sweeping along on the imagistic current she has unleashed, Nick Nolte gives a force-of-nature performance -- shrewd and gullible, bitter and innocent, bigger than life but still in touch with...
...bundle of nerve and other people's conventions (a little Mae West, a touch of Judy Garland, maybe all three Andrews Sisters rolled into one). But if as a performer Midler conjures up an older, bolder show-biz era, she doesn't nostalgize it. She gives it a rude, shrewd yet affectionate twist, satirizing and energizing it for contemporary audiences...
...even middling sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show are more effortlessly engaging than most of the nervous joke machines that pass for comedies today. Good ones like The Dick Van Dyke Show remind us that the trivial plot lines of old domestic comedies were often a mask for shrewd satire of suburban neuroses. The best ones, like I Love Lucy, which invented the vocabulary for the modern sitcom, have the formal perfection and infinite repeatability of great pop music...
...government meddling to his eager staff of deregulators. The council spearheaded Quayle's attack on lawyers and excess litigation last August, and is preparing to move beyond reviewing new regulations to tackling rules already in place. While Quayle's detractors dismiss the Vice President as silly and feckless, his shrewd handling of the council's affairs is just another sign that he is taking full advantage of his office...