Word: smartass
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...flat-out comedies, movement means the rapid flapping of a wise mouth. Cartman and his smartass school chums will try talking their way back into the pop zeitgeist with the feature cartoon South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. In Mickey Blue Eyes, Brit blueblood Hugh Grant plans to marry into a Mafia family and has to pass himself off as a Brooklyn gangster. Detroit Rock City, set in 1978, is about four guys trying to bluff their way into a KISS concert. It may remind you of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, made in 1978, about a bunch of kids...
...rival Dean (Paul Walker) sees this as his opportunity to be the new alpha male and ribs Zack into accepting a bet that he can transform any girl into the prom queen. Ensue about two hours of MTV-esque storytelling: clippy, slick, brisk, but jumpy. Jumpcuts, stylish melanges, smartass parodies of The Real World and even a choreographed dance sequence to Rockafeller Skank--all of this sealed with a kiss...
...every scale than his need to stay on the payroll. In an aside, Doonan alerts us to the impending effusive text, and writes, "This disclaimer... is designed to forewarn critics and urbane sophisticates who are not used to people saying nice things." Before you can even say anything smartass, you snap your jaws shut in shame...
Buchwald would surely plead guilty to the first half of the accusation, but not to the second. He almost never wrote to wound. Being an amiable smartass--a pseudonaif American trickster, like Bugs Bunny with a cigar in his mouth instead of a carrot, wandering through glittering Paris with its haute cuisine and wines he professed not to understand--became Buchwald's signature. In the 10 years when he wrote a column from Paris until the New Frontier attracted him to resettle in Washington, Buchwald made a very funny American Abroad...
...dying of cancer and Buchwald was writing the book, they made peace by way of shared memory: "Paris brought us together in the beginning," Buchwald says in his dedication to Ann, "and it brought us together at the end." Buchwald's old smartass merriment and his depressive undertow set up an interesting resonance in this volume. The dragoman was a more complicated man than the long-ago celebrities knew...