Word: cliche
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jackie beachballs, deranged assassins-all are strip-mined for significance. The performers (excepting Reed Birney as a gentle, doomed aristocrat and Natalija Nogulich as Danilo's one stalwart love) display little charm, conviction or screen presence. But the intensity of Tesich's obsessions can ennoble his clichés about love of family, friends and country. And Penn, a poet of domestic sexual tension, stages illuminating vignettes to express what the script or actors cannot: a spasm of violence at Danilo's dinner table; the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure...
...taken a little too straight out of Erik Erikson, or even Gail Sheehy, and the plot verges on the melodramatic (it takes a boating accident to seal the bargain of friendship between the generations). But emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve...
...means of making us see afresh the processes and fantasies, the obsessions and failures and triumphs of a very great artist whose work we assumed to be familiar. Who does not know Auguste Rodin, given that reproductions of The Kiss and The Thinker are the very furniture of cliché? Yet this exhibition shows us what we did not know. It brings forth not the debased Rodin of popular culture, or Rodin the herald of a modernism he did not live to see, but the actual artist, embedded in the 19th century, soaked in its values and yet struggling...
...inexhaustible stock of socko images still wows the impressionable, and forces everyone else to pay heed as his boring yet insistent voice announces verbal and visual abstractions as profundities. He justifies the gaucheries and incoherence of City of Women by passing it off as a dream work-a cliché from the time movies were as short and silent as this one is long and loud...
First, the good news. Les Amis are unbelieveably hospitable. Compared with them, according to GM, "the Frenchman is the most constipated human being on earth." Forget many of the chauvinistic clichés of the past. (Chauvin, after all, was a Frenchman.) Par exemple, the book points out, "the notion that the Americans could produce anything good to eat or drink used to make us giggle." Faux. Actually, there are several restaurants in New York (run mostly by Frenchmen) that would rank with some of the best in Paris. American restaurants, the book says, "are infinitely more elaborate, elegant...