Word: smugness
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...tone of the film is never satire, though, because there would be a self-seriousness in that. The jokes just keep the story human without cheapening it. No smug double entendres here; precious few anachronistic references. What makes The Three Musketeers so elusive is that the clumsiness is intentional and built-in, as one might infer from the casting. Yet the movie is deft. Clumsy and deft; uncorrupt and sophisticated; slaphappy and professional; gawky and disarming--the adjectives contradict each other, and one's reaction should be "yes ... but." Instead, it's just a simple unadulterated "yes," with little else...
...Smug Lecture. Tanaka's reply was somewhat evasive; he delivered a smug lecture about Japan's example of hard work and industrial expansion since World War II. He then told the students that in a three-hour meeting with Premier Sanya, he had offered to soften the terms of a $153 million loan and curb overly aggressive and ruthless private Japanese business practices through a new government agency, to be called The Economic Cooperation Ministry. None of this satisfied the students, who left the meeting threatening to "act against every Japanese in Thailand" unless the government acts...
Philip Barry's Holiday first appeared on Broadway in pre-Crash 1928. In scale, it is almost more of a ballroom-and-mansion comedy than a drawing-room comedy. Its characters, the big rich, are either smug, drunk or edgy, and terribly status-conscious. But the real locale of the play, its temperamental North, East, West and South, is the terrain of Coward, Porter, Fitzgerald and Bernard Shaw...
...demonstrate by their dramatically timely deaths just how difficult both courses are. Much suspenseful, if highly stylized, drama results from the interaction of these characters with one another and with hell on earth. Devotees of the prison-and-escape genre will enjoy anew such tradition-blessed ploys as the smug-gled-weapon bit, sundry chases through jungle and swamp, the operation-with-out-anaesthesia scene, and of course the solitary-confinement sequence...
...difficult for me to join in the festivities. I knew that she resented leading "Adeste Fidelis." I had been glee at the changing of my grade; now I was not smug. She really hated me. And I could blame her. But I hadn't expected...