Word: contrivedness
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The films replace the common fan's rooting interest for the home team -- just a geographic accident really -- with moral superiority. They are not just our guys, they're good guys; in some of these pictures, the fiercest competition is about which character gets to display the highest level of...
These are old-fashioned tales, resurrecting issues like passivity vs. action and honesty vs. self-delusion, and relying on such time-honored devices as unreliable narrators, characters who turn out to be angels in disguise, and good old melodrama. Echoes of past masters -- Henry James and John O'Hara, for...
What these shows generally lack, for all their charm, is conflict. Acting, an aphorism of the craft holds, is reacting -- responding spontaneously to what another actor says or does. In one-person shows, that essential tension is missing. Every confrontation feels contrived. No villain or even annoyance gets a fair...
But as contrived endings go, this one's little too contrived. Without giving away anything monumental, I'll just say it jumps fairly far into the future, and is preceded by a segment that s' out-and-out weird, even by Pudding standards.
Other than providing an opportunity for a reprise, no matter how contrived, of Camelot, the Clinton victory reinforced the singular definition of youth as that place where everything is possible. Age (and Bush's defeat) were represented as that place where one is constrained by limitations.