Word: cliches
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...there is such a thing as a foolproof movie, Escape from Alcatraz must be it. Throw together Clint Eastwood, an airtight jailbreak plot, a first-rate storyteller like Director Don Siegel ... and what could possibly go wrong? As it happens, almost nothing. True, Escape from Alcatraz embraces virtually every cliché known to prison movies. Eastwood does not exactly break new ground as an actor either. Yet this film's familiarity ends by breeding affection rather than contempt. When an old-fashioned genre piece is executed with spirit, audiences can rediscover the simple, classic pleasures of moviegoing...
...reveal the truth about his characters. This he has not done. Despite its length, Clogs is entirely composed of very brief scenes. Though the flow of vignettes captures the outlines and rituals of the people's lives, the individual peasants are permitted only predictable reactions to clichéd situations. Nor does Olmi allow his characters the chance to talk, however inarticulately or apolitically, about the matters of life, death and love that perpetually confront them. Presumably he has no idea what they would say. Since he has cast inexpressive non-actors in the roles, the faces on-screen...
...Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliché. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families...
...ultimately somewhat artificial. They are also recriminatory and divisive in any crisis that calls for the unity of shared sacrifice. Blame for heedless profligacy and bad planning should be addressed to corporate and Government leaders. But the responsibility is also shared by the larger population. Pogo's winsome cliché"We have met the enemy and he is us") is in full operation. Americans are not, after all, mere spectators in the drama of their own lives. They are, in historical terms, the most appallingly wasteful people who have ever lived; whole nations could live comfortably on their leftovers...
Some plays are the comic books of the theater. All of their characters are caricatures. Their situations have the labeled banality of canned clichés. The dialogue is Cro-Magnon English. In scene after scene the ludicrous and the dreadful intersect at some flash point where the playgoer's ribs collapse in implausible laughter...