Word: familiarization
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...decades have been Hong Kong and India. While European filmmakers went inwardly minimalist, those teeming Asian cinemas generated robust entertainment of pinwheeling action and violence (Hong Kong) and unabashed sentiment and music (Bollywood). Different in temperament, but alike in their vigor and brio, they were both exotic and oddly familiar to their American admirers. We realized that the radiant assurance of old-Hollywood movies hadn't died, it had just been reincarnated abroad...
...heavy on the action scenes and light on the big dance numbers. The movie does include other conventions of the genre, such as the need of a young man to both rebel against his father figure and please him, and the melodramatic abasing of the protagonist; but these are familiar from Hollywood films, so they won't strike the uneducated viewer as unduly weird, just a little hackneyed. Indeed, that's the impression I got from the movie: different faces, same clichés. And (another facet of Bollywood films), longer: 2 hours and 36 minutes. In current American movies...
...multiple marriage among religious Fundamentalists in Utah. (On Big Love, a man has three wives; on Tara, a man has three and a husband.) But Big Love quickly settles you into its odd setting. The particulars of the Henricksons' lives--their intrigues and secrecy, yes, but also their familiar family dynamics and sincere faith--are presented, simply and unpatronizingly, as the reality of the show's universe...
...hotel's philosophy, Hiscock says, is to give guests something a little different from the minibar-and-flat-screen experience so familiar from their business trips. Which means no minibar chilling tiny bottles of vodka and $5 peanuts, just an "honesty fridge" stuffed with San Miguel, lemon sodas and ice cream. No bells-and-whistles entertainment system, but a TV discreetly placed in each room and a library of children's DVDs to choose from. And in the restaurant, no culinary chemistry of foams or jus, just a beautifully simple $42 four-course dinner that makes liberal...
...bodies like cordwood for the cameras and proclaim the virtues of its "steadfast resistance," but it has offered the Palestinians no explanation of how this fight will advance their national goals. To many a foreign journalist, then, this war conjures an image with which Joe the Plumber will be familiar: the proverbial pig whose nature can't be disguised by any amount of lipstick...