Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...image of meat should be a virile one, best expressed in red meat." At the time it was highly unusual, even distasteful, to portray uncooked meat in advertisements. Enthusiastically breaking the code, Burnett produced full-page ads depicting thick chops of raw red meat against a bright-red background. "Red against red was a trick," he explained, "but it was a natural thing to do. It just intensified the red concept and the virility and everything else we were trying to express. This was inherent drama in its purest form...
...have its humorous moments. In one scene, Jake helps a police officer get his estranged girlfriend back by composing a song "Oh Marjorie," sung to the tune of "Oh Christmas tree." The sight of the officer bleating out the song in a steak joint as livestock baa in the background is silly (and desperate) enough to be mildly amusing. Still, it's the sort of scene that you know has been done before--a feeling we seem to get often; a class nerd gets shoved into a locker, carollers disperse before an advancing runaway sleigh, the mistletoe scene...
...tell which man is the oldest. Each generation, now with the knowledge of the atrocities of the Holocaust, will continue to age with experience and the memory of an inexplicably violent set of moments in history. The largest image of the old man towers behind other generations, filling the background of the canvas. Yet he is separated from each new generation by a fence or brick wall. He could be the generation of revelation, greater in size, wiser through time...
...always. As a man trying to make peace with his past mistakes, he seethes with regret and repressed anger. Slowly, however, Hopkins realizes that he is not a doomed soul. Time and time again, he steals the scene from Pitt and Forlani, turning the movie's overblown romance into background fodder for his own personal drama. When Hopkins says to Forlani, "I have no regrets; no regrets," before his time is about to run out, we believe...
...Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, resonates on a slightly more optimistic note. Although it is not an apologia for Dawkins' other books, it is a manual on how to read them. Dawkins contends that people habitually misconstrue science as deconstructive and demystifying. The average person, whose science background might not extend beyond a high school lab, has been programmed to set up a dichotomy of two domains for knowledge. Literature and the humanities are viewed as infusing wonder into the natural world, science as sucking it out. And so, people might feel "depressed" when they read something like...