Word: cleverisms
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...Nike won't go out of business if it can't sell its shoes to 50% plus 1 of the market. Nader is a niche product; he's like a UPN show trying to capture 5% of the audience. Whereas for the Big Two, clever is dangerous. You can inadvertently alienate important sectors of the electorate (for instance, the stupid) or come off as slick and dishonest. Since Watergate, ads have been much more straightforward--and artless. When the media landscape is carpet-bombed with ugly, blaring ads, perhaps every ad, regardless of its content, becomes a negative...
...have more homework in grade school than you had in college, and you sometimes feel grateful for traffic jams just because they give you time to think--the last thing we want from politics is more uncertainty. And for voters who don't want any more change, these two clever, complicated candidates have made it hard even to guess which one is more likely to deliver...
When Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote Gilmore Girls, on the other hand, she "never set out to create an 'alternative' family"; she envisioned "a mother-daughter relationship where they were more pals than mother and daughter." In this sweet, clever hour-long comedy, 32-year-old single mom Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) raises 16-year-old daughter--you do the math--Rory (Alexis Bledel), who's more reserved and adult than Mom; Lorelai wears Daisy Duke cutoffs to Rory's first day in private school and jokes that she offered "to do the principal" to get her daughter accepted...
...original movie was a cool joke America decided to play on itself. The Blair Witch Project, which last year earned a huge $140 million on a teeny $30,000 budget, was not by any stretch a great film. It was a clever prank, brilliantly peddled, that played on primal fears. And everyone had to be a part of it. Let's be scared by a horror movie with no visible monster. Let's convince ourselves it's real. Like kids in the dark, let's pretend...
...physical gags--one character keeps crashing into walls--look like outtakes from Carry On, Stripper. The result is a long slog to the famous last scene, where the boys get up in front of the town to take it all off. Which they do, in the clever high spot of a show that needs more of them. --By Richard Zoglin