Word: formulaic
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...space, two theaters, an ice-skating rink, shops and restaurants. A revitalized waterfront will sport the world's tallest Ferris wheel, miles of walkways and a 100-hectare botanical garden. To help bring in tourists, Singapore recently announced it had cut a deal to become a stop on the Formula One Grand Prix circuit starting in 2008; the city will host the annual event on downtown streets and may hold Formula One's first night race. For those with more genteel interests, a world-class art-and-science museum is being built near the Marina Bay Sands. Designed by renowned...
...defies the commandment to "honor thy father and mother" and that his liberties with Saturday rules on grounds that "the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath" flout the one that explicitly orders all humans to observe the day. Most important, Neusner read Jesus' repeated rhetorical formula "You have heard that it was said [in the Torah] ... But I say to you ... " as his claim to be not merely the religio-military Messiah some Jews hoped for at the time but also above the Torah and hence God. Neusner imagined having a dialogue with a Jesus-era Jewish "master...
...William Kristol's "The 2008 Formula": His quoting statistics from previous elections will not make good his bet on a hawkish Republican a winner in 2008 [May 14]. Kristol astutely points out that the next election will be an election of change and focused on the war, but he failed to connect the two. The next election will be a "change the war" election. If Republicans are to gain four more years in the White House, they will have to break completely with Bush on the war and foreign policy. If they don't I would be happy...
...Happy Meals, action figures, books, games and other ancillary-revenue projects.) All of which appeals to the grownups who chaperone the movie trips and endure the repeated DVD viewings. Old-school fairy tales, after all, are boring to us, not the kids. The Shrek movies have a nigh-scientific formula for the ratio of fart jokes to ask-your-mother jokes; Shrek the Third includes a visit to a fairy-tale high school where there's a Just Say Nay rally and a stoner-sounding kid stumbles out of a coach trailed by a cloud of "frankincense and myrrh" smoke...
Sound like a formula to you? What these stories are reacting against is not so much fairy tales in general as the specific, saccharine Disney kind, which sanitized the far-darker originals. (As did Shrek, by the way. In the William Steig book, the ogre is way more brutal, scary and ... ogreish.) But the puncturing of the Disney style is in danger of becoming a cliché itself. The pattern--set up, then puncture, set up, then puncture--is so relentless that it inoculates the audience against being spellbound, training them to wait for the other shoe to drop whenever they...