Word: hackwork
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...trailer for the film, put online earlier this year, stoked fears in von Trier fans of a mainstream sell-out; it "makes it seem, quite shockingly, like an uninspired piece of genre hackwork," wrote Xan Brooks on the Guardian blog. "Surely, that can't possibly be true." It's not. As von Trier has said in an interview with Knud Romer, he wrote Antichrist when he was bedridden by depression, and "I let the film flow to me instead of thinking it up... And because some of the material comes from my youth, it may be unreasonable, ecstatic." If even...
...most of the songs, co-written by Clarkson, rely on wide-screen, processed production gimmicks, rather than genuine hooks. And as any pop Svengali knows, making a pop record is as much a matter of craft and precision as it is eccentricities. It's about the thin line between hackwork and magic. As much as one can applaud Clarkson for wanting to be taken seriously, neither pop nor rock should sound as labored as most of My December. A Svengali might have also talked her out of releasing a summertime album with that title, but that's another story...
...Enlightenment doctrines of freedom. Michael Burlingame's forthcoming multivolume biography will add a tall stack of new documents to the record, including hundreds of newspaper articles that, Burlingame has determined, Lincoln wrote anonymously in his early political career. The articles shed new light on Lincoln's early political hackwork--which, Burlingame argues, makes his later achievements all the more remarkable...
...basics of the mainstream look. Using the best of that style, such as its dramatic angles, to create dynamic pages, Chadwick also infuses the artwork with quirks, like the frequent use of X-ray shots into a character's body, so that no one could mistake it for mere hackwork. Another major difference between The Human Dilemma and more mainstream books is Chadwick's uses of black and white rather than color. This perfectly suits the material, which explores the gray nuances of decisions about bringing another life into world...
Some of these literary, niche comics have inspired movies: last year's From Hell and Ghost World, this summer's The Road to Perdition. But they weren't introducing new men in tights to the mass consciousness. And with few exceptions, superhero comics became cartoon hackwork. "With Steve Ditko, Spider-Man had these sexual undertones to it that read as being the work of a singular artist," says Clowes. Today's successors, he says, are "just a 10th-generation regurgitation of the same stuff over and over." The comic crowd became older, insular and cultish while kids turned to video...