Word: slyness
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...STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles...
Classically trained and sitcom-bred, Hanks knows that the starkest drama can always use a leavening of wit. For most of the film, he underplays Forrest's reactions at a level somewhere between a fretful deadpan and the rural slyness of the early Andy Griffith. So when he releases his feelings at the end (when questions of fatherhood and family traits are involved), the scene gushes like a geyser...
...with some admirable under-playing from Watkins, Poreba absolutely stumps the reporter at their first meeting; her reply to his amiable "but I'm Mike to my friends" is "Of whom you have many, I'm sure." Poreba delivers such loaded lines with the perfect mix of sweetness and slyness, and men, including Connor, cannot help but fall helpless before her. While Tracy's relationship with her exhusband C.K. Dexter haven (Aaron Zelman) seems a bit too acidic at times, Tracy eventually proves to be nowhere near unbreakable, and Poreba vacillates admirably between the woman who tells her ex-husband...
Third, you attack motives, suggesting financial greed, slyness, and deception. As the sole author of Proposition 1-2-3, I resent that inappropriate attack. I am a real-estate broker, but not a landlord. I don't own or manage one rent-controlled apartment; and no broker is needed for a landlord to sell to his own tenant...
...naturalistically in fragments, in repetitions, in overlapping counterpoint of threats and expostulations and profuse four-letter words. Their conversation sounds authentic, yet is so idiosyncratic to its author that a couple of minutes suffice to identify it as his. This quicksilver gift of language, joined with an almost infinite slyness about the tricky uses to which words can be put, makes Mamet a superb entertainer. He is a sort of American version of Harold Pinter, but funnier, raunchier and with a keener sense of the particularities of time and place...