Word: shrewdest
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...show, starring a real-life talk-show host, who last starred in a sitcom as himself, a comedian with a sitcom. One's first impulse is to tell Garry Shandling to get a life. The second is to revel in this wicked expose of show-business narcissism -- TV's shrewdest media satire since Tanner...
Frayn is not so pretentious as to offer answers, but he strongly hints at a disaffected liberal's belief in the strength of the darker side of human nature. Benefactors is foremost a comedy, albeit a disillusioned one, and it makes its statements with jokes. In the shrewdest of them, the nurse, the one character who is not a university graduate, recognizes the architect's walled-in housing proposal as a variation of a college, turning its back on the rest of the world. Hurt's performance in the role, tinged equally with self-pity and pluck, is the production...
...shrewdest analysts of the industry are directors without intellectual pretensions. Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; True Grit) watches Darryl Zanuck turn misogynism into money: "In the early days we always had as a leading man . . . elegant, fashionable men who had good speaking voices. And Darryl said . . . 'Women love bums!' He took all the heavies; Bogey was a heavy; when he picked Clark Gable, Gable was playing a heavy . . . Richard Widmark . . . was the worst . . . heavy in the world . . . And it's still true. Look at the Burt Reynolds and the Clint Eastwoods and all of that crap coming...
With his carefully cultivated image as a wonk, Greenspan has been heard to say that he is a prop in the long-running political theater that is Washington. But he is also clearly an actor--one of Washington's shrewdest power brokers. He plays politics just as he plays his favorite sport, tennis, in which he is known on occasion to switch his racquet from his right hand to his left in the middle of a point to avoid using his weaker backhand. So it was that during the 1990s the onetime adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford...
...something truly unusual in nature: monogamy. For the black vulture, the California mouse and the chinstrap penguin, this rare state of affairs--or lack of affairs--is in the best interests of both male and female. Monogamy may not be for everyone, but staying faithful is sometimes the shrewdest reproductive strategy...