Word: clich
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...mention a lovely bride. Gere and Winger play this nonsense as if neither one of them had ever seen an old-fashioned military romance, and bless their youthful innocence, perhaps they haven't. Director Hackford, however, surely has, since he demonstrates an encyclopedic eye for their clichés. All eagerly serve Writer Stewart's earnest desire to reduce experience (he is a Navy OCS graduate) to pulp. Never does a satirical gleam enter anyone's eye. The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul. -By Richard Schickel
...applause is only the most conspicuous of the traits that impel a person toward the actor's life. Not quite so visibly, the actor type tends to have a streak of emotional gluttony on or off stage or screen. The result is an inclination to inflate the clichés of existence with more dramatic heat than ordinary people can work up. The tendency to view life as though it were play-acting often surfaces in actors' words. Writes Gene Tierney at the end of Self Portrait: "If my life had been a movie, would a director have...
...cliché of crime reporting that the murderer is described as polite, gentle and law-abiding. Richard Herrin, a courteous, religious chicano who had made it through Yale, certainly fit the nice-guy stereotype-at least until July 7, 1977. That morning, at the Scarsdale, N.Y., home of his girlfriend, Bonnie Garland, 20, Herrin, 23, smashed Bonnie's skull with a hammer as she slept. A few hours later, half-naked and covered in her blood, he surrendered to police in upstate New York, confessing that he had killed...
...idea. To say, as many Americans did after Watergate, that the "system works" is only partly true: the constitutional system, in this case, with a lot of luck, did work. The important lesson that Watergate established is that no President is above the law. It is a banality, a cliché, but it is a point on which many Americans, possibly including Richard Nixon himself, seem confused...
Mention video to some people and watch their faces fall. If the cliché of "modern sculpture" used to be a piece of stone chewing gum with a hole in it, and that of "modern painting" was a canvasful of drips, then the cliché of "video art" is a grainy closeup of some U.C.L.A. graduate rubbing a cockroach to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes while the sound track plays amplified tape hiss, backward. Video art has not yet shaken off its reputation as clumsy, narcissistic and obscure...