Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...young womanhood. The pageant is good for drama and giggles on a Saturday night. Nestled on the September schedule amid the Jerry Lewis Telethon and Monday Night Football, the Miss America show shares with those made-for-TV spectacles the lure of unpredictable thrills and gaffes, adventure and ennui. It's gaudy, it's fake, it's real, it's live! We hate it. We love...
...only a movie, Ingmar. Independent movies, like first novels, used to be autobiographical rites of passage. Now, too often, they are about making an independent movie, a format that quickly surrenders to ego and ennui. So Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion pleasantly surprises by its cunning. DiCillo's modesty is also his happy arrogance, for this is an indie movie about the filming of exactly three shots in an indie movie...
...movie about making movies, "Tom DiCillo's 'Oblivion' pleasantly surprises with its cunning, and by not surrendering to ego and ennui," saysRichard Corliss. This independent movie is about the filming of exactly three shots in an indie movie. "Everything goes hilariously wrong," chuckles Corliss. The boom mike dips into the frame. The idiot movie star unaccountably thinks he's a creative artist -- "imagine Kato Kaelin mistaking himself for Dustin Hoffman." It's a funny film, acted with a deft, manic touch...
Much of Life After God is well-written. Like Ian McEwan, Coupland has a particular talent for capturing ennui. In "Little Creatures," the narrator muses: "The nomadic lifestyle had taken its toll. I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at the point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat-borrow somebody else's life-their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own. "But the failure to move beyond this signals Coupland's main weakness as a writer...
Throughout the 1980s and '90s young first-time novelists have persisted in making detachment their dominion. Those writers have created worlds in which contemporary characters speak in a passionless staccato as they find themselves ravaged not by tragedy but rather by vague ennui...