Word: smugness
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...eight other defendants look at each other and smile, smiles that convey much of what is wrong with this film of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. They are smug smiles, full of condescension and unchecked theatrical egotism. The movie is extracted virtually as a piece from Father Berrigan's play, which was in turn a dramatization of his 1968 trial for burning draft records. There Berrigan, his brother Philip and seven other defendants tried to reverse the guilt and put the whole Viet Nam War on trial. But the characters in the film seem to be acting less...
...time that messes up both J.W. and the movie. Robertson trots out the usual herd of metaphors for contemporary alienation. When J.W. facetiously gives his address as " 1313 Luck Road," it comes out sounding smug and pompous because the rest of the film deals too literally in such symbolic shorthand, as in the goring episode...
...province of the lower middle class. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that racism--outside of the South--manifests itself at comparable rates in all classes. So as All in the Family tiptoes into virgin territory, it is dangerous if allowed to stand alone. The show feeds the smug, self-satisfied feelings of middle and upper-class audiences--who are as statistically as racist as Archie--but do not express their bogotry in such raw terms. Perhaps it is all right to have Archie worry about the 'coons' moving into his neighborhood, but let's also have Beaver Cleaver...
...casual viewer will be able to deduce that this film is a comedy only by sitting through the long pauses between lines, watching the actors play funny-face. Pocket Money is full of an infuriatingly smug cuteness that adds up to drastically short change for the price of a ticket...
...Harold Pinter has laid a series of booby-traps and land mines designed to destroy the categorizers, rationalizers and explainers in every audience. The Homecoming is Pinter's declaration of war on our tendency to assume that we know what is real and what is unreal, and on our smug assurance that we can analyze why people act as they...