Word: cliches
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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...
...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...
...Some elements do feel forced and clich, such as Tiny, Diana's brother played by Ray Santiago, who is stuck taking boxing lessons when he'd rather be designing fashions. Yet, for the most part Kusama avoids many of the tired conventions of the genres this film invokes. Unlike, say, She's All That, Diana's transformation from an offensive and frightening bitch into a beautiful and self-assured woman does not involve suddenly putting on lipstick and high heels. Instead, the way she manipulates her dark, piercing eyes, which are emphasized throughout the film, does the trick. And although...