Word: formulaically
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...Love and Death, Allen takes his fantasy setting to its logical extreme--a-lavish Tolstoy Russia. It works, but not as an unseemly setting for a slapstick stooge. There's no question that Allen's stock formula has hit home to a lot of losers and tickled a lot of losers-watchers, but when you get right down to it, it's a pretty thin joke. There are only so many laughs to the 98-pound weakling dilemma, whether it's set at muscle beach or Martinique. And it is where Allen scrapes the dregs of slapstick gags that...
Actually, Woddy Allen's formula is more sophisticated than just that. He generally takes some basic slapstick and Marx Brothers stuff, slathers it with the savoir-faire of the horny ethnic loser, and hurls the whole concoction into an unlikely context, usually the heroic fantasy world of the shlemeil. What he does is magnify the possibilities of the social banana peel. A Jewish herd blowing a date in the Bronx is one thing, but a Jewish herd posing as a Cuban dictator in bed with a sultry revolutionary who tells him he looks a lot like a Jewish herd...
...time-killing formula of training, education and recreation seems to have significantly reduced the racial tensions and drug problems that plagued U.S. forces in Korea and elsewhere in the 1960s and early 1970s. (Nearly half the 2nd Division's G.l.s are black and other minorities.) Morale also seems high in most places. A young lieutenant compared his life at Camp Casey with that at a "jock college." Closer to the DMZ, soldiers suffer from isolation, primitive facilities (hot baths once a week) and sheer boredom. It is at these bleak forward outposts that the U.S. would suffer its first...
...Tuscola station is merely one of the latest converts to the "all news" format, a music-free marathon of news, sports, weather and feature programs that has become the hottest formula in radio. Pioneered in 1961 by XTRA, a station in Tijuana, Mexico, that beamed its signal to Southern California, all-news had until last week been adopted by fewer than 20 of the nation's 7,140 AM and FM outlets. But those form an elite group: New York City's WCBS, the nation's most listened to station; KNX in Los Angeles, which has climbed...
...affection for San Francisco and his imaginative megalomania. "I don't know if all my ideas for City will work, but they're worth trying," he says. "In publishing, the margin of error is small, and people are frightened to try anything new, to tamper with the formula. But I find the frequency of a magazine exciting. With a movie, the whole process is so slow. Publishing City is going to be like making a movie a week...