Word: genericism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true ska fashion, with their upbeat music, the members of Reel Big Fish make Why Do They Rock So Hardfun in spite of its dysfunctional lyrics. The music on the album is not radical for ska--many of the songs sound borderline generic at first, using ska rhythms and instrumentation in predictable ways. But the music is not bland. The melodies are lively and infectious, the band uses short drum, brass, and guitar features to good effect and, musically, the vocals are interesting and well performed. Songs such as "You Don't Know" and "The Set Up [You Need This...
...interesting interred in gum on the bottom of some kid's shoe (allowing unusual camera angles that will really excite the graphics techies.) These shots are "cool," but do make it seem like an Imax documentary on the "lives of an ant" has been artlessly spliced into a generic Disney "plebian saves princess" cartoon...
...Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What, me sexy?) for the magazine profiles he writes...
...mere two years another movie about its protagonist, the legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine, which flopped miserably. Without Limits, which is a very good movie, will require a stroke of marketing genius to succeed. Or an unusual effort at understanding--a willingness by the audience to set aside generic expectations and engage the movie on its own terms...
...many Appleistas with him offered him theirs, the security guard threatened to confiscate the passes and call state troopers. Despite the flurry of frantic cell-phone calls and cries of "Don't you know who this is?" the guard refused to budge. Jobs had to retreat and find a generic pass with which to enter his own convention. Maybe the guard was a Windows user. --Reported by Daniel Eisenberg...