Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian-become, in the face of a spiraling market, a dead language, analogous to advertising copy and producing the same kind of knee-jerk reverence in a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire...
Contrary to cliché, Hollywood does not manufacture dreams; it preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...
Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene...
...concert ambience, its overeager references to Viet Nam and drugs, it has almost nothing to do with the '60s or the counterculture. The movie's true setting is the timeless never-never land of Hollywood kitsch; The Rose is a definitive catalogue of A Star Is Born clichés. The heroine battles with booze and men and show-biz tycoons, but somehow always manages to get out onstage and give a hell of a show. She has only two temperaments, childlike vulnerability and childish tempestuousness. The howler-ridden script makes little effort to tie these bromides...
...film is not entirely cliché-free. The character played by Mason is a fairly standard woman-doctor stereotype: pretty but prim, with deep-frozen attitudes toward men and a sharp tongue, at first, for the handsome radiologist (Michael Brandon) who wants to cuddle. Oddly, it is the teen-age romance that escapes stereotype: the scenes between Buffy and her boyfriend (Paul Clemens) are remarkably real and touching. In balance, the film is decent and compassionate, and truthful enough not to disguise too much the fact that truth can hurt terribly. -John Skow