Word: cliches
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...When the film, the most expensive of its kind at the time, was originally released, critics mocked it for its incoherence and seemingly false pathos. H.G. Wells called it the "silliest movie" and a mix of "almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general." Even director Lang, who acquired German citizenship through marriage and emigrated to the United States after the Nazis came into power, expressed dissatisfaction with his work in later years. But the rediscovered material sheds new light on the filmmaker's intentions. The restored version is thought to reveal...
...doesn't hurt that the author has an ear for precision and an aversion to cliché, and is also engagingly honest. "In mid-March 2005, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland announced Congo had become 'the world's worst humanitarian crisis,' " he writes. "For the few Western journalists based in the capital, this was fantastic news, meaning we'd somehow edged out the tsunami in Asia and the genocide in Sudan in the race for absolute misery...
...women dares to declare that there are other things in life than either career or children," says Christel Eckhart, a sociologist and professor of gender studies at Kassel University. This is not entirely new. Since the late 1990s, Berlin's vibrant musical underground has featured women who undermine gender clichés through in-your-face sexual behavior. The Berlin-based Canadian musician Peaches and the all-woman band Chicks on Speed are known for explicit lyrics and the use of sexual paraphernalia on stage. But what was a subcultural phenomenon may now be finding its way into the mainstream...
...pachyderm of a child. It's a huge and lumbering novel that took seven years to write and leaves hardly any ground unfurrowed. But Meera's growth from narcissism to selflessness is too slow, and her core epiphany - what it means to be a parent - is a cliché. Suri's cyclorama of a newborn, metropolitan India, where streets are clogged not with carts but cars, can be engrossing. Too bad a prima donna stands center stage, blocking the view...
...legendary filmmaker Costa-Gavras. Stress clearly evokes groundbreaking films such as La Haine, Man Bites Dog, and Clockwork Orange. Yet for the French daily Libération, "it's above all an absence of point of view that remains." Worse, laments Le Monde, far from dispelling clichés about the banlieue, the video leaves one feeling that the filmmakers "have ended up joining those they wish to denounce...