Word: smug
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...recent HEW television piece where high school students watch a film on segregation and then go to the lunch room. The black kid says, "See, there's no sign saying Colored Sit Here." And the white kid says, "yeah, our generation seems to have gotten it all together." Pretty smug, baby...
Fonda, however, continues her series of chillingly smug self-portraits in this installment of "The Jane Fonda Story." Even when the script calls for a loving gaze, she still has a look in her eyes that says "Ha ha, I'm making two million dollars a year so Tom and I can afford to be ostentatiously political." And while the camera tries to catch her pert derriere every time she bends over, Fonda looks older than ever before. Redford should have kept Rising Star and set Fonda free with the mustangs...
What follows is wet, dirty and boring, and goes on for hours. The truck's owner, an escaped city man who can sound irritatingly smug about the rewards of living in the country, is angry now at the cordwood, the mud, poor mired Linda, and himself. He is spinning wheels, wasting time. Great deeds remain undone, great orthodontist bills are unpaid. Awash with self-doubt, he heaves the birch chunks out to lighten the truck, then jacks, wedges, winches and ponders. At last Linda groans free, and all that remains is to retrieve the half cord of jettisoned birch. There...
...first two minutes, you begin to sense the shape of things to come. Later, you will hear Lysistrata pronounced as both li-si-stra-ta and leye-si-stra-ta, but by then the mispronounciation will seem only a minor quibble. Demos' portrayal of Dionysus is pompous, even smug, as it should be, but his pretentious remarks about respecting the sanctity of Aristophanes' play, whether performed in Athens or the Winthrop JCR, rings hollow. Director Estrada didn't, why should...
...poetry of his own sentences, speaking softly, a clear ribbon of regret winding through the words. But at tims, Hanes' voice rings too smoothly, Shakespearean in tone, stagy. Tom is a writer, not an actor, and the immense presence that Hanes gives his character is oddly wrong, too smug, too fulsomely gesturing, too much exterior acting. It is a terrific role, at once subtle and obvious, but the actor's energetic anger, bitterness and sense of adventure must come from deep within. In the scenes that call for dynamic confrontation with Amanda, Hanes is very good, but at other times...