Word: formative
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...videocassette, the eight-track of its day. And the commercial-free American Movie Classics channel was still showing Paramount and Universal goodies from the '30s and '40s; it also staged annual Film Preservation Festivals of, say, silent and early-talkie John Ford pictures. (Then AMC changed its format, emphasized "newer" movies, and devoted so much time to advertising that it became known as Always More Commercials...
...generation of old-film fans in the urban snarl, panache and breathless efficiency of the young James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, plus a bunch of directors that scholars had mostly ignored. But TNT was clogged with commercials, sometimes 15-20 mins. an hour. In time, the oldies format gave way to basketball and reruns of '70s TV shows. The FOOFs were disconsolate... and ecstatic when free TCM premiered Apr. 14, 1994 (again with Gone with the Wind). The same library would be ransacked, but the new channel was free of commercials, more smartly programmed and anchored each evening...
...Nobody's perfect, not even TCM. We could quibble that, a few times, films (Li'l Abner, Lovers and Lollipops) have been shown in the wrong format, so that the actors look either too fat or too thin. Once in a while a picture doesn't quite fit its time slot; it will start before the designated time, or conclude after it, and if you're recording you miss the beginning...
...identical, albeit in the absence of that same inspiration. The presence of accordions and fiddles, or a slightly sharper guitar sound, doesn’t do much to thwart the dominant impression that we’re in distinctly familiar, necessarily more boring territory. Variations on the blues format have lately become fallbacks for Dylan, but they were always convincing before. Here, he doesn’t revive a blues aesthetic so much as he regurgitates its tropes on the awkward “My Wife’s Home Town,” or the downright embarrassing...
Last night, Howard A. Zucker, an Institute of Politics visiting fellow and the former assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, led an interactive question and answer session on modern health policy. “I don’t want this to have a lecture format,” Zucker said with a smile at the beginning of the session, who added that he preferred to encourage question-driven talk in order to address student perspectives and queries. Discussion ranged from global and national health policy issues to Zucker’s personal perspective in these fields...