Word: shrewd
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...Road" films (the five major ones are the '40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia - Alaska - and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker's game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob's Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry; Bill Murray to Hope's Martin Short...
...practice is as stone alpha male as social interaction gets. Giving someone a name--any name--is a highly presumptuous act, assuming as it does the right to boil down someone's persona to a sole characteristic--and then legitimize it through repeated use. Of course, Bush has been shrewd in his choices--while sometimes bawdy, his nicknames are rarely pejorative--and he understands that for most people, a pet name suggests intimacy, a special relationship that in fact may be entirely phony...
...said that the bright prince, John Kennedy, was Clinton's hero. Clinton is also the dark prince, Richard Nixon. Kennedy died and stayed dead. Nixon was the real Comeback Kid. Add a touch of Lyndon Johnson to Clinton's character - not the tragic, Lear-like LBJ, but the shrewd cornpone conniver, the genius politician - and finish the picture off with a quantity of Flem Snopes. There you have him, the Kingfish from Hot Springs, as gaudy and complicated as Americans...
...election. (I hope they were able to get their deposits back.) "What most intrigues me about Bush is how he uses low expectations to his advantage," Jay says. "His opponents judge him by his sometimes awkward public performances and fail to realize that he is a shrewd judge of character with keen political instincts." Both reporters have family connections to their new assignment. Jay's wife Claire Shipman has been covering the White House for NBC News (her cubicle in the press section is one flight up from TIME's), while John's mother, TV correspondent Nancy Dickerson, reported...
...larger meaning in director Thornton's original cut--said to have been close to four hours long--is impossible to say, at least until the DVD comes out. For the moment, we have a perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance--shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable. Maybe this movie might have been more. But it could easily have been a lot less...