Word: wile
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Though Reagan dominated domestic affairs, the same cannot be said of his handling of foreign policy issues. His strident anti-Soviet rhetoric increased cold war jitters. Using all his political wile the clout, the President won grudging Senate assent for the sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia. The victory staved off what would have been a humiliating public defeat but did little to advance any coherent U.S. strategy for bringing peace to the Middle East...
...character, and captivating adults via snatches of humor, the movie's thrust falls somewhere in the dangerous middle ground. Gilliam was Python's sordid animator in Time Bandits and often uses people as if they were cartoons. There are many violent scenes worthy of Tom and Jerry or Wile E. Coyote except with live subjects as characters smash into walls, eat rats, and explode. It's bad enough when Elmer Fudd blows up and survives unscathed, but the violence here is too up-front to be humorous and gets in the way of any moral...
This book does wile away an hour or two in a useless, harmless sort of way. It's doubtful that it will convert anyone, but it could make a nice hard-bound supplement to that magazine rack in the bathroom...
...Like the Spanish master, Jones finds his great subject in obsession, and he understands that finally, all truly memorable comedy results from observing creatures caught helplessly in the grip of irrational, inexplicable passions. Buñuel's obsessives are all sexually motivated; Jones' great creation, Wile E. Coyote, has a loftier theme: the annihilation of that uncannily shrewd nemesis the Road Runner...
...Hardy (to invoke just two other great names), this team specializes in a comedy of severely limited means. There is basically only one gag: the Coyote thinks up ever more elaborate schemes to fell the bird that never wert, and the attempts always backfire. But what makes old Wile E. an immortal figure is what is known in the trade as "character animation"-those marvelously rendered expressions of confidence, cunning, determination, frustration and panic as he finds either the huge rock falling on him or himself falling off the cliff, while the bird scoots off across the desert landscape...