Word: gimcracks
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...largest casual dining restaurant concept in the world" (Ruby Tuesday, by comparison, has just 880 locations). Note the language: Applebee's is much more concept than restaurant. It serves food grounded in no particular ethnic or regional cuisine in settings bewilderingly overstuffed with pop-culture images and gimcrack Americana. The following items are affixed to the walls of the Jamestown Applebee...
...self-aware as he clearly is, the unhinging outcome is perhaps too much of a surprise to him and not entirely persuasive to us. That said, The Pledge is still an original and morally alert detective story. Whatever its defects, it reminds us, in our seemingly endless season of gimcrack thrillers, that tense, well-played realism can invigorate our commitment to fictional lives, involve us in the dilemmas of everyday existence as they steal up on people and catch them unaware...
Catching the wave of a profitable gimcrack trend -- that explains why people make these movies. But why do people pay to see them? Are filmgoers, like conscientious environmentalists, determined to recycle everything, including the detritus from the glowing box in their living room? Are they so afraid of the present that they take refuge in the airiest, least threatening artifacts of their past? Even so-called contemporary movies, like Reality Bites, make iconic references to '70s TV shows. Even so-called original movies have the relentless closeups, the pummeling pace, the insistent underscoring and the audience-prodding reaction shots...
...throwback to a time when the cultural mission was clear, thinking was big, and budgets were gigantic. But then Meier, 57, is rather gloriously anachronistic -- and high-minded and portentous -- himself. While most of his peers have spent the past two decades feverishly inventing (or capitulating to) a sometimes gimcrack neo-neoclassicism, Meier has remained an unrepentant circa-1927 Corbusian -- modernism's last best heir. "I don't think you change your values every day or every time you do a new building," he says. "If you are worried about style or what is the trend of the moment...
...serves up film and television history in two strengths: straight up and with a shot of circus-clown seltzer. But even the serious exhibitions provide the tang of astonishment. A display of 58 machines -- from the 1835 thaumatrope to tomorrow's Sony GV-8 Video Walkman -- pulses with the gimcrack genius of those anonymous technicians who gave artists the tools to dream with. The spirit of Philo T. Farnsworth, boy pioneer of TV, rides again...