Word: unctuous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time, however, the conversation on The Arsenio Hall Show is just what you'd expect from a talk show that bills itself as a party: lots of small talk, much of it boring. Hall's show-biz gush rivals Merv Griffin's or Rivers' at their most unctuous. His treatment of guests is overly deferential, his questions stultifying softballs. ("Let's talk about pet peeves," ran a setup for Kirstie Alley.) The talk on Carson's Tonight show may be programmed and artificial, but at least it gives the illusion of a real conversation. Hall seems tied to preset questions...
...written with the wit and grace I might expect from a not very intelligent ninth grader in a remedial composition course. To judge from the comments of my friends and the reaction of the audience, I surmise I was not alone in finding this speech insulting in its unctuous stupidity...
...case of a New Jersey serial killer. Director Joseph Ruben brings his no-nonsense classicism to what could have been just another tabloid horror story. And Schoelen is the most appealing teen in recent movies. But the triumph is O'Quinn's. With his a- mite-too-wide smile, unctuous pieties and neatly calibrated spasms of rage, he creates a paradigm head of the postnuclear family: an evangelist of father love and blood lust...
Next is the gee-I'm-so-cute-and-friendly approach, usually employed by girls and unctuous preppies. "Aw, c'mon, please, pretty please," they whine, eyelids batting somewhere down about the level of their drooling lips. But most annoying is the dissatisfied customer angle, to which there is no legally permissible reply. "Hey kid! I get more than that...
WETHERBY'S MYSTERY IS NOT "Whodunit?" but "Why did he do it here?"--a bloody good practical joke. A young man shows up at a small dinner party and is graciously assumed to be someone's guest as he mixes with the unctuous ease of an unreconstructed Yuppie. The next day he enters his hostess' warm kitchen, sits, chats ... and shoots his brains onto the stucco wall...