Word: smug
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Because we had the guts to run a favorite son for president, we are now the only ones entitled to wear t-shirts that say "Don't Blame Me, I'm from Minnesota." And every time Reagan sells arms to fanatics or falls asleep during negotiations, we feel a smug satisfaction. Everyone else is to blame...
...reviewer, Parker once slated a hapless author as a "writer for the ages. For the ages of four to eight." She could be equally cruel to her nearest and dearest. When Alexander Woollcott, a fellow jouster at the Algonquin Round Table, recalled an afternoon of book signing with the smug rhetorical question "What is so rare as a Woollcott first - edition?", Parker replied deadpan, "A second edition." Presumably it was the memory of such moments that prompted Woollcott to term her "so odd a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth...
Rites of Passage ends with a bang that would seem to preclude much in the way of a continuation. Edmund Talbot, a smug, upper-class young man sailing from England to the Antipodes in the early years of the 19th century, concludes the private journal he has been keeping for his godfather and patron back home. Talbot's shipboard jottings have coalesced into the remarkable story he witnesses at sea: the long scapegoating and mysterious death of Robert James Colley, an Anglican clergyman...
This decidedly common touch is in keeping with Director Brian Murray's sour vision. At the center of Blithe Spirit is a love triangle: smug, conventional Ruth Condomine (Ivey) is in love with her novelist husband Charles (Chamberlain); so is hoydenish Elvira (Danner), his late wife, whom Madame Arcati accidentally materializes; and all three of the Condomines are passionately in love with themselves. Most productions of Coward tend to be as glittery and brittle as spun glass. Murray brings the proceedings down to earth: these are not natural aristocrats but peasants with money and a veneer of polish, and when...
...constitutes an excellent preparation for life. Outside, in January 1945, the war is still going on. But aside from a shortage of food and fuel, it has not troubled this serenely bourgeois Dutch family. And with the Germans obviously headed for defeat, they may perhaps be forgiven the slightly smug aura that hovers about them. It seems as if their faith in the eternal values of liberal humanism has triumphed over the hurly-burly of modern history...