Word: cliched
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story and milieu are familiar enough, in movies from The Graduate to Diner, to constitute a new American genre. But whenever Baby, It's You starts to become rambling or folkloric, Sayles and his charming young actors find a way to twist or energize the clichés. You can catch a glisten of moisture in the eye of an "easy," misused girl who's too proud to cry; or contemplate Jill's half-embarrassed smile when she goes dancing cheek to Sheik; or fall in with the gliding camera that circles the young lovers during their...
...Fast Times at Ridgemont High) plays the youth who recognizes his own decency and sensitivity about two hours after the audience has been tipped to it. Penn is fine; so are most of his companions in misery. But waiting for this film to embrace every known generic cliché is like serving an indeterminate sentence: you know it has to end but cannot understand why that shouldn't happen a whole lot sooner than it does...
...Club, and, to emphasize the lonely helplessness of Mac and his kind, a series of longshot landscapes that dwarf the actors. But with his jeweler's eye for casting and a fond patience with his actors, he allows every performance in Tender Mercies to shine through the visual clichés like the home truth in a country ballad...
...discovery of what the couple is up to, the rental of a love nest, the first illicit meeting, the initial acknowledgment of mutual attraction, with which the film ends. There is something smug and self-conscious about this conceit, but it is also unbalancing. Since the triangle cliché is so familiar, the only possible way to impart suspense is by focusing on what happened first...
...Southern California, mixing conventional imagery of Beach Boys serenades and fast rides in convertibles with darker asides about "a big nasty redhead" and a bum "down on his knees." Like the other keynote songs on the record-Christmas in Capetown, Miami-I Love L.A. turns the topography of tourist cliché into a nightmare landscape on which the sun never sets...