Word: smugness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Smug...
...this earnest effort serves a useful purpose. It illustrates how an erudite Dudley House senior, with the best intentions in the world, can let admiration for his peers lead him astray. Reaching for the profound insight, Gerzon ends up only with a smug revision of Youth Wants to Know. Here is a fairly representative passage: "With increased cultural communications today's well educated young people cannot accept meanings and opinions. They have access to too many thinkers and have too great a degree of mobility for the ethnocratic answers given them in childhood to remain satisfactory...
...incident in Athens, circa 1963. A Spock-like physician-politician (Yves Montand) addresses an antimilitary rally. As he leaves the assembly hall, he is viciously clubbed by hired assassins as a truck simultaneously brushes past him. Three days later, without regaining consciousness, he dies. Officials immediately offer smug condolences about the "regrettable traffic accident." But a few bits of offal stick to the whitewash. A journalist coaxes a witness into a confession; an alibi springs an irreparable leak. The incorruptible public prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) remains unswayed by police and government threats. Ascending clues like the rungs of a ladder...
...tightly constructed, more acute. He has a film maker's sense of composition and a novelist's sense of rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita) has led a smug and comfortable life of reasonable success with his job, with his family and his women. Two intimations of death destroy this placid equilibrium: a colleague is stricken with a heart attack at a staff meeting and the executive himself accidently runs over a construction worker. The colleague recovers...
...magic lay in his ability to lift his countrymen from such petty aspirations -and from such deep self-doubt. Now both appear to be returning more distressingly than ever. No one believes that France, the revolutionary birthplace of modern democracy, has lost all pride and will sink into smug complacency because De Gaulle has gone. Frenchmen have realized, however, that their rating as a nation depends less on one man's words or actions than on their combined deeds...