Theirs was a conspiracy of empty smiles.
The simpleton Michael may be an odd career choice for an actor courting stardom, but even with a goofy, empty smile, Prateik has charisma.
Katherine Heigl plays Abby, a producer for a ratings-challenged Sacramento morning television show, the kind that specializes in empty smiles, cooking tips and weather updates.
As Mick Haller (Mickey in the books), Mr. McConaughey keeps his focus tight — Mr. Furman making sure his camera does the same — doling out empty smiles to the guys with the badges and going straight for the clients whose innocence matters less than their wads of cash.
His stock in trade was the wink, the nod and the empty smile, and the men who worked on the outer reaches of his universe despised him for his cheapness, his cunning and, as one of them, Frank Graham Jr. said, the way he affected the "Irish pol manqué." The men closer to him admired his intelligence and understood that his was the game of making money, even if he took winning far too seriously.
It will be the same as every year, empty smiles plastered over pained grimaces, desolation and foul reminders of the bleakness of the human condition on display at every turn.
The room would be empty except for us, but the moment my glass was empty, a smiling Italian was at my arm filling it up all over again.
Serena Joy helped build the prison she lives in, and it's hard not to feel a certain grim satisfaction as she supports an agenda that implicitly sets her lower every time she accepts the Commander's smiling empty support or his earnest empty promises only to lose.
That left the empty seat, a smiling Dillard and a stoic Katz to enjoy a few seconds of airtime.
The singer might be speaking from the cradle of his lover's arms, or chasing her down a street, or watching the lights of her train diminish in the night; he might be crouched alone in an alleyway, or wandering an empty house, or smiling for all the world to see while his words rattle, unspoken, inside his skull.
