Word: smarted
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...There was a lot of this peculiar energy in the characters portrayed by the great silent comedians. And there was a lot of it in Maxwell Smart, the doofus, inanely self-confident secret agent Don Adams played in Get Smart, the iconic 1960s television series in which Mel Brooks and Buck Henry started satirizing James Bond almost before he made his first smirking wisecrack to Miss Moneypenny. One dared wanly to hope that the loose, slightly impoverished air of that funny, curiously memorable little enterprise might somehow prevail in our era of more grandiose imagery...
...honest, that hope began to darken as I thumbed through the production notes prior to a screening of Get Smart. Many persons involved with the movie prattled on about their swell new action sequences "worthy of any thriller" with their up-to-date "scale and scope." Scale? Scope? Are they kidding? Here's the deal, guys: action sequences are not funny. They never have been and they never will be. For they require that their protagonist set aside his bumbling physical incompetence and start acting decisively and heroically. At which point our connection with him is broken and he becomes...
...That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point. So, too, is that his sidekick is played by the lissome Anne Hathaway, who also seems willing to go along with a gag if only she could find one. Or that their nerdy colleagues in CONTROL have a few attenuated comical moments in their fight to save the free world from KAOS. They are all strapped to a hurtling plot line that is heading from one fireball to the next, with only...
...works; this is Pixar's most enthralling entertainment since Nemo. A science-fiction epic that starts off as a smart twist on the last-man-on-Earth plot and veers into a fable about humans' overreliance on technology, the movie should connect with audiences of all ages because it stars the most adorable little trash-bot ever. He's less a trash collector than a trash connoisseur, adding new items to the treasures he keeps on shelves in the shack he has built for himself. Hmmm, what about this green thing, a plant sprout, that he found in his foraging...
...more Hillary Clinton's thing. Now, with Clinton finally out of the picture, the presumptive Democratic candidate is trying to make up for lost time with a two-week campaign swing through battleground states like North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio, talking about the economy at every stop. That's smart. But if Obama's early speeches are any indication, his reinvention of himself as the economy candidate is not going to be a slam dunk...