Word: habit
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Defying common labels seems to be a habit with Zhang. While he is categorized as a "Sixth Generation" director, Zhang balks at the reductionist labeling prevalent in Chinese cinema. While Zhang is right when he says "discussing directors as cohesive generations collapses varied styles into one," generational labels do help identify key changes in cinematic practice. Unified by a stylistic break from the past and disillusionment born out of the Cultural Revolution, Fifth Generation directors searched history and literature for a native, pristine China...
...Control, something is turning '90s college-age adults into smokers at a higher rate than their '80s counterparts. Despite success in some population groups, adult smoking rates in the 1990s have remained essentially static, thanks to large numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who are picking up the habit. Between 1965 and 1990, the percentage of Americans who smoked plummeted from 44 percent to 24.7 percent, a drop the CDC likes to cite as "one of the 10 most notable public health achievements of this century." Current figures are well above the agency's goal, which...
...less of an imbecile (and no less of a dilettante) than Bouvard and Pecuchet, I fear I might also have come to share this habit of theirs. Stupidity is a harsh word. To use it is to suggest that one speaks from a more enlightened plane, which in my case would be an absurdity comparable to Hitler's claim that he was a man of peace. What I can say is that the sheer strangeness of everyday life confuses...
...fact is, today's smokers, especially heavy smokers, know that smoking is bad for them, but that knowledge doesn't usually stop them. They develop a sort of split personality when it comes to their bad habit: ask any addict around campus (and there are still quite a few out there, despite enormous social pressures to quit), and he or she will tell you that she pushes the health-hazard right to the back of her mind whenever she smokes...
...inside actor John Malkovich's body for 15 minutes, then be dumped next to the New Jersey Turnpike--all for $200 (tolls included). That's the weird, beguiling premise of writer Charlie Kaufman's absurdist romance. Jonze, a music-video whiz and an actor (Three Kings), has the vexing habit of forcing his attractive stars (John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener) to deliver their big scenes through clumps of matted hair. But he keeps the wheels spinning on this funny-peculiar story of people so desperate that they would pay to be anyone else. Even John Malkovich...