Word: smirk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...every Olympics would be an occasion for any participating nation to needle or humiliate any other nation. Medals would be presented, as in the athletic events, but in the embarrathon both winners and losers would be asked to mount the platforms so that the world might jeer or smirk as it chose. Or are we getting desperate...
...them sell off comedy's right to social criticism in exchange for the chance to make soft-core porn. Perhaps that accounts for the dispirited and guilty air of a film that makes even Rio look ugly and cannot work up so much as an honest smirk over what it is doing. -By Richard Schickel
...sure, there are large and hairy losers in this chrestomathy. Truman Capote's A Day's Work is a smirk posing as an empathic look at a cleaning lady; Marshall Brickman's pastiche The Analytic Napkin is road company Woody Allen; Dan Greenburg's How to Be a Jewish Mother has aged so rapidly that it makes the paper beneath it look brown. But almost everything else functions well in Richler's idiosyncratic, exuberant and welcome volume. What does not work is a steady insistence that humorists are a devalued species. In fact they enjoy...
...except for the Japanese guards, who are wily beasts. Through the sweltering days and ominous nights, three British prisoners run variations on the national character. Hicksley-Ellis (Jack Thompson) conducts his impotent belligerence by the book; ragged, resilient Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has the clear eyes and defiant smirk of a Kipling hero; Lawrence (Tom Conti), the camp translator, is an Oxbridgian humanist seeking a tunnel into the Oriental mind. Men are strong; men are shot; men fight on for their peculiar codes of honor. This is an art-house Bridge on the River Kwai, with neither bridge nor river...
...Best and the Brightest using intricate formulas and training to create a project that, to the average Joe, at least, is wrong. The historical commission voted 5 to 1 to issue a "certificate of appropriateness," but few passersby walk through Johnston Gate without a giggle or a smirk. "Cookie house" is a common label floating around the Yard. One employee asked for the designs so he could build a doll house for his daughter, Scott, who says he himself is pleased with the final product, concedes that some might not be so enamored of it. Among the host of comments...