Word: conceits
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...Steve Buscemi) learns to his peril not to make eye contact with that mysterious young couple on the opposite platform. Another American in Paris, Sofia Coppola, was given the run of Versailles to film Marie Antoinette, about the Austrian girl who became the last Queen of France. Coppola's conceit is to reconceive the court of Louis XVI as a gossip party for rich, vapid teenagers. The film, starring Kirsten Dunst, got a few raucous boos, sending many critics rushing to its defense. Their gallantry was sweet but ill-conceived, for this lame satire is both a parody of emotional...
...Quad. Having grown tired of explaining why all the white people lived in the best houses, the administration instituted a random lottery. Technically speaking, then, house pride should have wasted away and died, like your hopes of a fulfilling life. But like the human appendix, this strange conceit remains, an evolutionary left-over from the time when people cared about where they lived. It’s important to realize that house pride is like Eastern European nationalism: a lot of slogans and flag-waving that mask an undercurrent of broken dreams. It’s true that every house...
RYAN ADAMS 29 Renowned for writing songs faster than most people have life experiences, Adams, 31, fills his third album in the past 12 months with nine lengthy tracks, each of which summarizes a year in his 20s. It's a conceit that at times elevates his self-pity to epic proportions (on The Sadness he wails, "The sadness is mine," over a flamenco guitar lick--¡qué melodramático!), but it also creates moments of immense tenderness as Adams says a reluctant goodbye to youth (Carolina Rain, Starlite Diner) and contemplates a commitment to something other than himself...
Postmodernism comes to kid lit! But to children it will seem more like good subversive fun. The conceit is that the book's illustrator, Ned--who is often depicted hard at work--can't paint fast enough to stay ahead of the reader. So a cartoon stand-in for Lendler keeps turning up to urge the reader to slow down for Ned's sake and to please, please not turn the page yet. Now, what youngster can resist defying such a request? The narrative, a standard knight-rescuing-an-imprisoned-princess tale, unravels ridiculously as the overwhelmed Ned is forced...
...Three years later, Harvard welcomed Jane Addams of Hull House; in 1918, Congress passed the Susan B. Anthony Bill, the first step towards enfranchisement. While ginger ale, moonlit walks, and secret sleepovers might have been fulfilling enough for the 1905 woman, The Club risked falling victim to its own conceit...