Word: deader
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...today's teen audience, those days are deader than the Dark Ages. But the high school worries about pride and friendship and whether one should pack Tic Tac or gum on a date are timeless. On a wedding day three pals (Richard T. Jones, Omar Epps and Taye Diggs) flash back to their youth in Inglewood, Calif., courting the girls and stoutly refusing a joint from the local gangster ("What are you all, Muslims or something?"). The movie is aiming more for American Graffiti than American Pie; it dares to hint that a man should strive for humanity, not strutting...
...people nuts. This isn't last summer's type of teen-scream movie. The new films, a dozen due for release this year, are essays in mature terror, for and about grownups, with big or serious stars and a few A-list directors. For the moment, slasher films are deader than a naked cheerleader. Horror is going both artsy, in the Method madness of The Blair Witch Project, and adult, in the domestic suspense of Stir of Echoes. Renouncing sicko-kid melodramas for a mix of ghost stories and satanic parables, Hollywood is pursuing subtler demons, deeper themes: matters...
Until not so long ago, Sinatra's notion of cool was deader than an imploded casino in Vegas. Bourbon on the rocks and snap-brim hats were your parents'--no, worse, your grandparents'--idea of hip, stuff that looked quaint beside the bug-eyed alienation of the 1960s. Hippies wore blissed-out smiles and ponchos. Sinatra wore cuff links, roughly $30,000 worth in the mid-1950s, when that kind of money bought a house or two. In the Oedipal drama of the counterculture, Frank was the daddy-o who must die. He could swing his raincoat over his shoulder...
Some may argue against surveys by claiming that most students learn the basics in high school. Come now, let's be serious. I haven't had European history since ninth grade and that was with a teacher who was arguably deader than the white males we were studying. Granted, I'm an electrical engineer. I admit that many history majors probably do enter the university with the facts required to jump right into micro analysis...
...this might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build...