Word: cliches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...verbal comic, Allen was the fastest gun in the business, and a true heir to Groucho Marx for his inventiveness with language, constantly pirouetting around the tired cliché or the pretentious phrase. Yet he had an infallible internal censor that kept his wisecracks from ever being cheap, or risqué, or mean. He kept a police whistle at his desk, which he'd blow whenever a line or bit of business crossed the line. He remained old-fashioned that way, as well as in his stubborn refusal, unlike Carson and almost everyone that followed, to do "savers" when...
...Clich: The integrity of the press depends on its keeping a clear line between editorial and factual content. Opinions, like this one, must be carefully labeled and set aside so that the reader may rest assured the rest is fact. Often, it is precisely the guise of unbiased reporting which skews the truth in problematic ways. Currently, though, the average American--watching 30 minutes of evening news each day--will have, as regards the candidates, little truth to skew...
...with "Men of Honor." But that may not be so. There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar. The director, George Tillman Jr., either doesn't notice or doesn't give a hoot about the way Scott Marshall Smith's script piles up clichés. He just keeps driving his movie right on through them. What's true of him is true of his actors too. De Niro pitches his performance on the edge of psychopathy, where menace and comedy very effectively coexist. But it is Gooding who does the most to redeem the movie...
...Inspired (a word that is bound to make realists queasy) by the real-life story of a man named Carl Brashear, who is played by Cuba Gooding Jr., the film is feverish in its desire to reduce his experiences to a compendium of clichés. Carl is, to begin with, the son of a black sharecropper. He joins the Navy in 1948, when the military is officially desegregated yet still confines men of his race to the galley. But he sees Navy divers being heroic and decides to join their ranks...
Their names have endured as clichés of musical humor, be it in an ancient Cheech and Chong routine or the tongue-in-cheek moniker of the near-forgotten rock band Blind Melon. But there was nothing funny about Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, who in their time exerted a huge influence on the evolution of popular music. A pair of new compilations from Shanachie, painstakingly assembled from old recordings from the 1920's and enhanced for maximum audio quality, provides a valuable insight on the oeuvre of both of these unique performers...