Word: unctuous
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...festival's highest honor, went to the Ingmar Bergman-scripted Best Intentions, an elegiac love story produced for Swedish television. Other top awards went to director Robert Altman for his wry Hollywood basher The Player and to actor Tim Robbins for his deft portrayal of an unctuous studio head in that film...
...short-haired, fast-talking comedian who influenced a generation of stand-ups with his deft skewering of pop culture and the media. Others (like Carlin's mentor, Lenny Bruce) had poked fun at these subjects, but none with as sharp an eye or as much performing brio. Carlin's unctuous radio deejays, TV newscasters and commercial pitchmen were not simple parodies; he used them to satirize a whole society that had its priorities out of whack. "The sun did not come up this morning, huge cracks have appeared in the earth's surface, and big rocks are falling...
CLINTON'S roots are populist, and he has not forgotten about the people most disaffected by the Reagan years--people whose votes, of course, he would love to win. But even if it's just unctuous political rhetoric, Clinton's concern for these people is missing from the plan offered by Paul E. Tsongas...
Preening for the camera in a white suit and Panama hat, an unctuous TV talk- show host named Agamemnon tries to prove his credentials as a Latin Lothario by reading letters from female viewers inviting him to "invade me, blockade me, dictate me." An amber-skinned transvestite named Manny the Fanny gyrates to a dance-club hit while recalling her Krazy Glue revenge on an unfaithful boyfriend. A punchy Peruvian ex-boxer, pressed to name a famous Hispanic, searches the blank canvas of his mind. "William Shakesperez," he intones. "He wrote Macho Do About Nothing and The Merchant of Venezuela...
Their slap-and-stroke routine extends to Oval Office meetings, where Bush is unfailingly gracious, whether with earnest junior staffers or craven special pleaders. It is Sununu's role to wring useful information out of unctuous presentations and rebut one-sided arguments, and he delights in it. Bush clearly relishes the edge and the rigor that Sununu provides. "He has made a lot of friends for our Administration," Bush says, "on the basis of competence, sheer competence...