Word: smug
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...something of a prisoner, heaven knows, of the sweetness she personified so memorably in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. A musical about transvestites and mobsters, set in gay Paree, might seem quite a departure. But in the end there's something excessively sweet--something earnestly preachy and smug--in Victor/Victoria's pleas for tolerance. Edwards' brainchild may flirt with naughtiness, but it really wants to be nice, which gives Andrews a chance again to play Julie Andrews. For Mary Poppins has always known how to treat naughty-but-nice children: be gentle, but make it clear...
Boyd Gaines' Robert similarly embodies a curious split. Is he living in the '70s or the '90s? The production uneasily straddles the two eras. These days Robert's dissatisfied juggling of the women he dates looks a little smug and patronizing. Evidently he doesn't realize he's suffering from Peter Pan syndrome--and a dozen other pop-psychological maladies illuminated on post-'70s talk shows. No wonder Company's director, Scott Ellis, so often has Gaines peering handsomely but dazedly into the spotlights. What's to become of him? He blinks with uncertainty--unlike his creator. After Company, Sondheim...
...watched the verdict being read last Tuesday, I felt ill--ill at the fact that someone I believed to be a cold-blooded murderer was walking home, ill at the fact that the smug "Dream Team" was displaying its joy at having beaten the justice system. And most of all, I felt ill watching O.J. thank the jury for granting him a pardon...
...political caviar" while "the people in his sea of black and Hispanic faces were being told that ketchup was a vegetable, their mothers were welfare queens and the quintessential criminal in America was black rapist Willie Horton," and that Powell "is but an instrument for white people to feel smug about solving racism...
...tough as weeds and can grow in cracks in the concrete. There was great art, drama, writing and scholarship in America before 1965, when the endowments were founded. Dedicated people create ingenious strategies of survival for themselves. But why should they have to? By what meanness, through what smug Philistinism--and, above all, on what actual evidence--do our Jacks-in-office decree that the arts and humanities are beneath the interest of the American people and unworthy of their collective support...