She was the teenage mother who had embarked on some image polishing of her own, posing on magazine covers and appearing on television as a bright-eyed spokeswoman for abstinence.
If Mr. Allen had image polishing in mind, the wear and tear of travel creates its own spontaneity.
The Museum of the Moving Image polishes its karma in the new year by making amends for the old.
This year's speech and question-and-answer session contained none of that image-polishing.
And those warts seem, somehow, to be the point: Hollywood doesn't do much with explicit sex anymore (the NC-17 rating has proven to be a commercial kiss of death) and the image-polishing of stories and characters turns darkness into mild shadow.
If O'Neill and his boss end up delivering nothing — if the trip appears in retrospect to have been just another bit of "compassionate conservative" image-polishing — they can expect to hear from the lead singer of U2, with the volume cranked.
BEIJING — When Xi Jinping, the vice president of China and its presumed next leader, returned from a crucial image-polishing tour of the United States in February, he faced an even more delicate matter at home.
Like their recent wedding, with its overload of publicity, the show is transparently part of Ms. Minnelli's comeback and image-polishing, even though the more publicity the newlyweds get, the more late-night comedians speculate about the husband's sexuality.
The visual effects in the descent movie were undertaken by Jakub Knapik of Platige Image; the Polish company also did the effects for Ambition, the promotional sci-fi short that Esa made in support of the Rosetta mission.
For the other, it represents valuable image-polishing.
