Word: smartly
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...Hanks, Cruise and ladies' champ Julia Roberts are the gracious wits audiences like to imagine themselves as, but they are also prisoners of their own goodwill, condemned to deliver endless variations on the same performance. Crowe can play anything because he has conditioned audiences to expect anything. He is smart enough to possibly be given credit for premeditating this eremitic media strategy; he is also obstreperous enough simply to hate having his privacy invaded...
...Stephen King or The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. A couple more clicks and you get an image of the page where the phrase appears (and, if you choose, two or three pages before and after). Care only about books that discuss WMD at length? Amazon is smart enough to remember which books were bought by other readers who did the same search, and to rank those titles at the top of the list...
Anyone half familiar with the capture and rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch in Iraq or the kidnapping and rescue of Elizabeth Smart, for instance, will not learn much from the dueling movies on NBC and CBS (both Nov. 9, 9 p.m. E.T.). For Saving Jessica Lynch, NBC couldn't get the co-operation of the 20-year-old private, but that didn't stop it any more than France's balking stopped Donald Rumsfeld. Lynch (Laura Regan) ends up less a character than a prop. We learn little about her captivity, and she has scant dialogue or characterization...
...making The Elizabeth Smart Story, on the other hand, CBS worked closely with the family of the Utah girl abducted for nine months, allegedly by a religious fanatic and drifter who calls himself Emmanuel. The movie follows Ed and Lois Smart as they butt heads with the police, who are portrayed as wrongheaded and arrogant. They cast suspicion on Ed, and slough off the parents' pleas to look for Emmanuel, the family's former handyman. Dylan Baker, who played a suburban dad pedophile in the darkly comic movie Happiness, is the ideal choice for Ed--he radiates piety or creepiness...
Elizabeth Smart has a most unlikely hero: a star from a rival network, namely, John Walsh (Bruce Gooch), whose America's Most Wanted was instrumental in Emmanuel's capture. The winner of the CBS-NBC battle of the quickies, it turns out, is Fox. Two hours of prime-time advertising, and it didn't pay a cent. --By James Poniewozik