Word: smilingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
George Will for one--and that should have been reason enough to convince any right-thinking fan to smile broadly last night. In the past few years, the Yogi Berras of the game have taken a back seat to what Stephen Jay Gould recently called the "pointy-heads." These are the people who see in every ground ball to short a reference to Shakespeare. Baseball's funny men loved their game, but, thank God, they knew it was a game and they didn't take it too seriously. Can you imagine Yogi saying, as the No Lights fanatics...
...like Tom Cruise, who radiates old- fashioned star quality. Onscreen Cruise looks life-size or a little less; his body is not so much beefy as blocky; when he laughs, his prominent nose turns into a knuckle. Yet if Cruise disdains perfection for a roguish humanity, his million-watt smile makes him immediately likable, even swoonworthy. In Risky Business, Top Gun and The Color of Money, he effused an unselfconscious self- confidence, an anachronistic but winning spirit of American go-get. In an ideal suburbia, Cruise is the boy next door, most likely to succeed...
...electorate. Most of them don't know who the contras are, and even fewer care whether Congress votes to support them. Statistics show that most often the candidate who presents the most optimistic speech at his party's convention wins in November. The lesson is clear if disheartening: Smile a lot and hire good speechwriters...
...gaze is usually impenetrable and impatient, but on this night his brown eyes glistened with moisture. His smile is generally a measured half-moon, but on this night his mouth widened into a toothy grin. From the moment he ascended the multi-tiered podium in Atlanta, before he uttered a single syllable, the Democratic nominee seemed a man transformed. Punching the air in triumph, blowing kisses to his wife: these were not the metronomic gestures of a soulless technocrat. Could that be Michael Dukakis, the unflappable exponent of cool reason, choking on his words? Yes, there was a catch...