Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This revolutionary formula brought potent results. Saigon withdrew at the first upsurge in NLF militancy, and wide tracts of rural South Vietnam began to implement massive reforms under liberation force leadership. Diem and his handful of allies, trapped in the cities, began to totter...
...usually encourage quick, cheap, and successive imitation. In the sixties, the youth film and the tepid sex/promiscuity film became the obvious examples of such industry-wide stagnation. More elusive, perhaps, was the much wider range of films which merged violence with psychodrama after the model of Hitchcock's Psycho -- formula films where violence was often the only substance, films that Hitchcock wouldn't even deign to sneeze at. Exploiters like Strait-Jacket, the 1964 axe-murder movie, led later to box-office hits like The Boston Strangler (still playing in Boston drive-ins today), and also to superfluous and exploitative...
Their chances are promising. The elections will see a change in voting procedures; candidates will no longer need a straight majority to win but will be chosen by a method of preferential choice known as "proportional representation"-a formula that should not only give the Catholic minority a stronger voice but also help the moderate minority...
...first novel since The Ordways, William Humphrey has remained true to the once effective formula for the Southern novel-using the Southern family to melodramatize the passing of a way of life through the death of the elder. Only in this instance it is not a dying patriarch, but matriarch-not a Big Daddy but a Big Mommy...
...their fantasies in black-and-white. The perspective is probably more appropriate now. The corruption of the seventies needs to convince itself that it's at least delicious, and the sterile, abstract morality of the supervalues -- for all their McCarthyesque overtones -- provide smugly laughable kitsch. The camp formula is simple: take this gleaming man of steel and turn him into a shambling buffoon...