Word: smug
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Broadway have lost their juice. What went wrong? Is it that the intimate conversations, the teasings of Southern- gothic catastrophes, the colloquial bitchery ("She was known all over Copiah County as cheap Christmas trash"), the climactic conciliations -- all of which seemed fresh, if not downright impudent onstage -- play smug and stilted on the big screen? Or has something precious been lost? When does a faithful, almost literal adaptation turn into a genteel lynching of its source...
...before visions of national championships can dance in Crimson heads, Cleary sounds a precautionary warning to his team: "Never be smug...
...sanctimonious purposes. Dramatically too The Mission is a drag, almost as much as those Old Hollywood films like Stanley and Livingstone that mindlessly extolled colonialism's virtues. Indeed, this movie is rather worse than those benighted bio-pics because it confuses the importance of its subject with its own smug self-importance...
...Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century and a mad one, between well-behaved traditionalism and liberated modernism -- but nowhere was the sense more highly refined than in hothouse Vienna. Right now, on each side of the Atlantic, that singular, overwrought time and place is evoked in two remarkable museum shows...
...deal without that kind of smug, judgmental Christianity," Brian retorts. "That's not what Christianity is all about...