Word: cliches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grappling with had authentic, immediate and dangerous implications in their own lives. And that we are not all that far removed from a time in this country when simply being black, whether outspoken or invisible, was a highly risky business. The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents it recounts, but it has a good, large heart. You could do worse, this holiday season, than to take your children to see this movie and encourage them to reflect on where we have quite recently and shamefully been in this country - when...
...later. I got off like a house afire - cover stories, features, business news, plane crashes, you name it. But in middle of the '99 season the managing editor pulled me aside for a little talk. I knew what was coming. "Your story starts are down," he said. "And your cliché count is out of sight. " I reminded the boss that I had led the league in snappy adjectives the year before. And early in the '99 season I'd hurt my right index finger trying desperately to pound out a deadline piece on the Super Bowl. I was playing...
Death may be, as the cliché has it, the ghost haunting the attic of everyone's mind, but the movies don't usually play it that way. They turn it into melodrama's force majeure, the sneering, swaggering (and generally well-armed) bully it is the hero's duty to resist and ultimately defeat - thoughts of his own inevitable mortality being matters for that last reel that no one ever bothers to shoot. Or think about...
...difference is that The Producers had a solid, even ingenious, comic storyline - about a Broadway producer who sets out to create a bomb show so he can run off with all the investors' money. Young Frankenstein is, by contrast, mainly a series of goofs on old horror-movie clichés - gags that don't resonate as well on stage, and that lack the comic propulsion that keeps The Producers moving along. That puts a lot more burden on the usual Brooksian jokes about big knockers and small penises - which, as a result, seem more desperate this time around...
...There is a larger problem with the conventional wisdom that Clinton has been too careful and calculating in this campaign. That charge is often expressed as a question about her "authenticity" - that foolish journalistic cliché meant to denote the appearance of informality and spontaneity. But authenticity is not the same as courage. You can fake authenticity. You can't fake courage. Clinton has always had a problem with authenticity. Her laugh, sometimes awkwardly manufactured for public use yet always delightfully raucous in private, is Exhibit A. But her plans on the big domestic-policy issues - health care and energy...