Word: formulas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hollywood, a town that loves formula films about cops and buddies and fighter pilots, a hot new character has emerged. Meet a hero for the 1990s: the dead. Or nearly dead. Or just back from the dead. But don't be spooked. Hollywood believes this could be fun and meaningful at the same time. Just listen to the sales pitch for a script being peddled around the studios right now: "It's a Ghost kind of Die Hard. It's a Home Alone Ghost. Better, it's a Ghost Alone...
...competitive in the labor market, a thriving economy that could provide a job for everyone who wants to work, and more access to capital markets for minorities who want to < start their own businesses. Meeting those tasks is more difficult than parceling out opportunities according to a racial formula, but in the long run more worthwhile...
...women are cast as pliant toys or conniving Delilahs. The male rappers who weave this image -- among them Ice Cube, Ice-T, Too Short and the Geto Boys -- spin exaggerated tales of salaciousness and violence, portraying themselves as potent, swashbuckling urban heroes. Since a macho image is a proven formula for success, rap producers were reluctant to sign female rappers. The music moguls were also fearful of challenging the form's rigid orthodoxies: in rap, as in heavy metal, feminine voices do not always supply the requisite loudness and abrasiveness...
...female rappers are creating buoyant messages that transcend the inert boasting so common in male rap. Salt-N-Pepa may have found the most satisfying and successful musical formula yet. Salt (Cheryl James), Pepa (Sandy Denton) and Spinderella (Dee Dee Roper), who met while working in a Sears department store in 1985, punctuate soul-tinged R.-and-B. melodies with teasing, street-savvy raps about maturity, independence from men and sexual responsibility. In 1988 Salt-N-Pepa, one of the first rap groups to cross over into pop radio, released a single, Push It, that sold more than 1 million...
Alas, a career full of lost skirmishes with the moguls proved that even Welles couldn't shake Hollywood free of its romantic realism. It held then; it holds today. Except that now the old glamour has atrophied into formula: boy's adventures and ghost stories and lady-in-distress thrillers. When was the last time a Hollywood picture moved anyone to exclaim, "Well, I've never seen that before!"? Perhaps surprise is not on the menu of today's moviegoers. They want reassurance, domestic fairy tales come true, not the astonishment that Jean Cocteau demanded...