Word: axioms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...axiom that a generation of breakneck economic growth has brought its own problems. Modern China is not charming. Many of its towns and cities are desperately ugly and shoddily built, workers have few rights, and environmental disasters abound. As global demand contracts, China's export-led, manufacturing-heavy economy is now facing a sharp downturn. Moreover, the accepted narrative of China - that Deng opened up and modernized an old-fashioned and hermetic economy - needs much qualification. Recent historical research has stressed that China was modernizing and internationalizing fast, if imperfectly, in the half-century between the late Qing dynasty...
...delicate dance that Michelle is required to perform calls to mind the axiom that blacks must be twice as good as whites to get half as far. A few Democrats - and feminists - expressed disappointment at her convention speech, with its subtext of, Ignore my race and my Ivy League education and look how warm and maternal and unthreatening I am. But others, including, presumably, Michelle herself, recognized this soft approach as a necessity...
...from My Fair Lady. Nostalgia, as wispy as the scent of marijuana that permeated the SkyDome, is itself decadent. By highlighting the past, Madonna is saying the present has little to offer. In doing so, she is also forging a bond with her loyal gay audience. It is an axiom of pop culture that no uncloseted gay man can be a star but that women can be stars by appropriating gay motifs. Bette Midler steals gays' jokes; Madonna steals their style. It's not just in the Nazified naughtiness of her night-at-the-Anvil routines, or the treatment...
...other axiom 300 proved to Hollywood is one the comics industry has known for decades: "The audience for comic-book movies is overweight guys in their mid-30s," says director, comic-book-store owner and overweight guy in his late 30s Kevin Smith. Actually, the average age of a comic-book buyer is 23, but Smith's point--that there are fans aplenty to support R-rated comics franchises--has been digested. Even PG-13 comic-book movies are maturing. Batman keeps getting darker scripts, like Nolan's The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger (in his haunting...
...invents its own challenges. The typical director worries that most people will see his movie at home, their fingers on the fast-forward and stop buttons, so he makes every element instantly understandable. That's why most movies seem as if they were made for the passengers of the Axiom. But WALL?E plays without safety nets or spoon-feeding; it reinvents the delicate, potent behavioral language of silent-film comedy, of the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films...