Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...white males. During the affirmative action era in California, it was far from "absurd" that race played a significant role in admissions. Instead, the Board of Regents was trying to create campuses which represented the diversity of California while recognizing the educational disadvantages inherent in a poor socio-economic background...
...characters are stylized and predictable, from her distant father and elegant mother to the Swedish personal trainer named Greta. Her parents have all the standard trappings of wealth: mansion in Connecticut, Florida beach house, Aspen condo. Even the psychological background created through carefully spliced-in childhood flashbacks is contrived and formulaic. It is textbook. Her parents were never physical with their child...they were never physical with one another...they never yelled, but "Silence was the weapon" in their household. Jane feels perpetually inferior to them. Estranged from her identity, haunted by her parent's expectations, rejected by medical schools...
Naturally, Eddie also gets agitated by the television, its sheer glut and ridiculous range of information from sitcoms to disasters to Ginsu knives. One shot isolates this inhuman condition of having a secondary reality at one's fingertips: Eddie's remote-control-enabled hand alone on the glowing background of the electronic hearth. How to distinguish anything in this white noise? Reduce everything to a series of zeroes and ones, of equivalences and otherwise? In perhaps the screens' best-ever depiction of date realism, Eddie pigheadedly refuses to allow the don't-mind answer of Darlene (Robin Wright Penn...
...immigrant, having been born inIreland. Her political background includes a bidfor Lieutenant Governor last year, which, thoughunsuccessful, made her name known in thecommunity. She has not held city office since astint on the school committee that ended...
...albums can be seen as the darker, bastard children of New Wave music. The few songs to emerge from the murk are lifted directly from the 1980's. Holiday's "In My Car" is reminiscent of New Wave bands like Yaz, and "Sad Little Moon" contains beats and a background taken from pop radio of the aforementioned decade. Additionally, a strong Men Without Hats (circa 1986) influence can be discerned on Tomorrow's "Technical...