Word: cliches
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...tricks, the Nixon pardon. Unfortunately, Writer Stanley R. Greenberg (Pueblo) retells the story without regard for the niceties of strong character development or well-paced storytelling. In the entire series his only theatrical flourish is the use of a flashback format in the first half. Besides being a TV cliché (especially in nonfiction dramas), the device is counterproductive. Whenever Dean reaches a pause in his reminiscences, the show stops dead the hero and his lawyer (Ed Flanders) can rehash the obvious moral lessons of what has just happened...
...that coaches can be tough taskmasters, that pretty girls and college recruiters fawn over the best players. If these tedious observations were served up in an interesting way, the movie might at least offer some entertainment. No dice. The American Game is a survey of film-making clichés. There are soupy graphics, split-screen effects, a platitudinous narration. The editing is so splintered that even the few potentially good scenes, those set at the heroes' homes and locker rooms, are too short to allow the characters breathing room. There is also an insistent musical score that sounds...
Perhaps such significant shading is one reason why Le Monde's Middle East veteran, Eric Rouleau, reflects that U.S. journalism got trapped in clichés about "the progressive Shah" beset by "fanatic religionists." But when it comes to nationalism, how about the French? They allowed Ayatullah Khomeini a sanctuary they rarely grant other political exiles to campaign for the Shah's overthrow. Rouleau speculates that the French, miffed by being shut out of Iran's arms deals, "took a calculated bet that it wasn't a bad idea to be host...
...real architecture, and too expensively finished for most developers to tolerate), would cover any function: airport, bank, office block, church, club. It tended to be what the Germans labeled Stempelarchitektur, rubber-stamp building. Thus a debased form of Modernist dogmatism, what Charles Jencks called "the rationalization of taste into clichés based on statistical averages of style and theme," turned out to be the official style of the '50s and '60s. When repeated ad nauseam by architects all over the U.S. during the building boom of the 1950s, to the point where the curtain-wall grid had become...
...loud, hard-driving music notwithstanding, The Buddy Holly Story is at heart a very old-fashioned film. As Robert Gittler's fictionalized script follows Holly's rise from obscurity in Lubbock. Texas, to national superstardom, it embraces all the romantic clichés of showbiz success sagas. Holly (Gary Busey) leaves behind his suffocating small-town girlfriend (Amy Johnston) to seek the bright lights of New York; he overcomes early rejection to become the toast of the record industry; he outgrows his original back-up musicians (Don Stroud. Charlie Martin Smith) and creates a revolutionary new sound...