Word: cliched
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliché. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families...
...ultimately somewhat artificial. They are also recriminatory and divisive in any crisis that calls for the unity of shared sacrifice. Blame for heedless profligacy and bad planning should be addressed to corporate and Government leaders. But the responsibility is also shared by the larger population. Pogo's winsome cliché"We have met the enemy and he is us") is in full operation. Americans are not, after all, mere spectators in the drama of their own lives. They are, in historical terms, the most appallingly wasteful people who have ever lived; whole nations could live comfortably on their leftovers...
...tricks, the Nixon pardon. Unfortunately, Writer Stanley R. Greenberg (Pueblo) retells the story without regard for the niceties of strong character development or well-paced storytelling. In the entire series his only theatrical flourish is the use of a flashback format in the first half. Besides being a TV cliché (especially in nonfiction dramas), the device is counterproductive. Whenever Dean reaches a pause in his reminiscences, the show stops dead the hero and his lawyer (Ed Flanders) can rehash the obvious moral lessons of what has just happened...
Some plays are the comic books of the theater. All of their characters are caricatures. Their situations have the labeled banality of canned clichés. The dialogue is Cro-Magnon English. In scene after scene the ludicrous and the dreadful intersect at some flash point where the playgoer's ribs collapse in implausible laughter...
...that coaches can be tough taskmasters, that pretty girls and college recruiters fawn over the best players. If these tedious observations were served up in an interesting way, the movie might at least offer some entertainment. No dice. The American Game is a survey of film-making clichés. There are soupy graphics, split-screen effects, a platitudinous narration. The editing is so splintered that even the few potentially good scenes, those set at the heroes' homes and locker rooms, are too short to allow the characters breathing room. There is also an insistent musical score that sounds...