Word: smugness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...result is a movie that is at once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy. And qualities increasingly prevalent in an era enervated by the ironic ideal. (Wouldn't it be ironic if irony destroyed our ability to make one another laugh?) At some point in What Planet Are You From? you start to wonder how these people acquired the air of unearned superiority that makes the movie seem so old and tired...
...truth universally acknowledged that a Bridget Jones novel that begins with "Hurrah! The wilderness years are over" must be setting up a false dawn. What fun, after all, would it be seeing the same woman whose diary invented a whole support vocabulary for Singletons turn into a Smug Going-Out-With-Someone? Fortunately, while Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason begins where Bridget Jones' Diary left off-i.e. in happily-ever-after mode, with Bridget making goo-goo eyes at new-found beau Mark Darcy-the heroine reverts back to her neurotic type, convinces herself that Mark secretly...
Still, America watched. We can't help ourselves. Sitting in the comfort of our homes, we can feel mildly appalled and wonderfully smug. Whatever our own love life might be, we haven't sunk so low. We assure ourselves, as we watch the bevy of prospective brides, that we never will. Money, we think, isn't everything. And we wonder how much she'll cop in the divorce settlement...
...took George Bush a while just to realize he'd been shot. His aides had been relentlessly smug about his prospects coming out of Iowa. He was so confident in the final strategy sessions that when New Hampshire veterans like Judd Gregg and Tom Rath urged Bush to slap McCain around a little, cut a negative ad comparing McCain to Clinton and slot it into the weekend rotation, they ran into a wall. Like his dad fending off Bob Dole in 1988, "W" was resistant, but unlike his dad, he wouldn't be budged. One reason: "W" believed...
...Warner's 1962 poli-scare film Red Nightmare. You'll see a teenage Dick York (the first Darren on TV's Bewitched) as a "shy guy" who wins friends by sharing his radio-building expertise, and young Jack Lemmon, in Once Too Often, as a smug suburbanite headed for a sickening car crash. Sex Hygiene, a 1942 VD film with gross-out closeups of pustulant penises and bizarre soaping rituals, was directed for the Navy by no less than John Ford...