Word: smugness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lose control at the Orson Welles, lose control and scream "Bergman stinks" as I hurl the coffee-maker against the t-shirt display on the art deco wall. However this reaction isn't entirely the fault of the Welles, which I believe was named the Real Paper's Most Smug Theater of 1976. I learned to fear so-called "art films" and the theaters that screen them at a very early age, when I was dragged to a seedy little known theater in Detroit to see a "beautiful and sensitive film" and enrich my culturally deprived life. This place...
...making a stand with small-scale movies which make up in honesty for what they lack in monumentality and pyrotechnics. Cheered on by his audiences and lauded by critics, Yates, with a movie about bicycles, has out-distanced power-driven, Dolbyized, super-slick monsters like Rocky II and smug, summer-hyped star vehicles like Meatballs...
Even the world's supposedly greatest metropolis has lately begun to sound like one of those boosteristic burgs that Sinclair Lewis used to deride. There was a day when New York City was so smug, haughty and complacent about its firstness that Author Irvin Cobb thought the place possessed "absolutely not a trace of local pride." Yet in the 1970s, the Big Apple, as the city now cutely calls itself, has been larding the air waves so much with a treacly, self-addressed valentine of a song ("I love New Yorrrrrrrrrrk!") that even a tone-deaf statistician might wonder...
...Shiva's persistent sardonic tone undermines his anecdotes' effectiveness. The reader tires quickly of his smug arrogance, and yearns for some affirmative statement about Africa. Everyone on the "dark continent" seems to be a caricature--all racist and drugged white tourists, or insufferably dogmatic bureaucrats...
...however, the audiophile down the block with all the latest equipment may be able to whip out a record smaller than a conventional 45 and put it on a machine that will scan its data with a laser. The sound will produce, in the owner, a guarded but rather smug smile, and in the envious listener the impression that his old conventional rig at home produces the tonal qualities of two Dixie cups and a thread...