Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...central characters. The tale of the shrewd French trapper Pasquinel and his Scottish partner McKeag becomes a roving chronicle of the West from St. Louis to the Rockies in the early fur-trading days. In a later set piece, Michener brings pageantry to the ancient cliché of the cattle drovers beset by thirst and outlaws on the long trail from Jacks-borough, Texas, to the South Platte...
...American press probably graver than any faults displayed during Watergate is the lack of expertise in many fields, a failure to develop the techniques necessary to inform the public on highly complicated subjects, to lay out the alternative choices and possible solutions in an increasingly baffling world. Cliché thinking and reporting are a far greater danger than bias...
...relationship between the occult numerology of the kabbalah and his 50-minute score. In fact, the Dybbuk music is a bland, pseudo-modern pastiche-a murmuring of Mahler here, a shriek of Stravinsky there, stray leitmotifs of Hasidic melody to suggest ethnicity. Robbins' choreography matches the music, sometimes cliché for cliché. When the orchestra explodes in a burst of Yiddish song, dancers sway sinuously, as if at a ghetto wedding. There are great yaps of brass at Big Moments of high stress; on stage, the performers thrust splayed hands to the skies or to the audience...
...suddenly getting pregnant at age 15. And so on. But then what can you expect of a movie about blacks in which the main love scene is preceded by a meal of fried chicken? Thank heavens they did not have watermelon for dessert, but that is about the only cliché of black life the film has avoided. Richard Schickel
...still lifes, for instance, a set of landscapes that he painted at Céret near the Spanish border of France in 1913 are almost embarrassing: he could not reduce the intractable organic shapes of hill, tree and terrace to anything much better than a set of decorous formal clichés whose color verges on the garish. Indeed, the only part of the great outdoors he could handle with ease and pleasure was the sea -itself flat, rotating upward to face the viewer like a blue polygonal tablecloth -framed in the shuttered terrace door of a villa...