Word: smartly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ready to shatter. She was sitting next to her husband while he argued with Katie Couric about smoking--and then argued some more, and some more. "I'm not certain whether it's addictive," Bob Dole insisted, like a mule-stubborn father who won't concede that his smart-aleck daughter is right. Why did Dole dig in so hard on the losing side of the smoking debate? He went through hell to quit the habit, and he used to get into fights with his first wife about her chain-smoking. He even lost his own brother to emphysema...
Starting from scratch, Gorton calmly explained to Dyachenko that she and her colleagues must suspend their beliefs. "You live in Moscow and travel in the most elite circles," he said. "Because you're smart, you are used to trusting your instincts. You can't do that in this kind of work. You have to know what the people you don't know are thinking...
That's a great pile of narrative nuts and bolts and, dutifully sorting through it, Bergman forgets to explain persuasively what a nice girl like Erin--smart, spunky and a former FBI employee--is doing in a dump called the Eager Beaver, taking off her clothes for a living. Worse, he misses Hiaasen's strength: setting mean-funny characters spinning through lowlife milieus. Yes, Burt Reynolds has some dirty, lively moments as a crooked, sex-starved Congressman. But the crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman's fastidious...
...there, right? The star, the premise, the gimmick (those guns fire the laser version of smart bombs), the no-brainer plot, even a glimpse of the bad-guys-of-the-moment, Russian criminals who have emerged, fire-toughened, from the ashes of the Soviet Union. The movie, as many have observed, even borrows the sure-fire elements of "Mission: Impossible": infiltration of a supposedly impregnable government sanctum, corrupt government execs...
...secret code of gestures: Elizabeth pats him on the lower back ("Bob, we need to get going"); she rubs his hand ("Don't look so glum--smile!"); she loops her arm around his waist and firmly tugs ("Quit talking to these reporters, and don't make any of your smart-aleck jokes"). On the podium, she will nudge him gently toward a better camera angle or come to his aid by grasping an unwieldy gooseneck mike that...