Word: hokey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Liberty Weekend, some carped, was more about profits than patriotism, more about commerce than comity. The opening-night ceremony was a sentimentalized show-biz tribute that left no cliche unturned, a hokey combination of the old Jackie Gleason show from Miami Beach, the Rose Bowl parade and the Ziegfeld Follies. But what, after all, could be more American than that? Show biz, not solemnity, is an American hallmark; taste is not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. President Reagan's aides were concerned that their man would be demeaned by the Busby Berkeley choreography. Others joked about his pressing...
...ways. Sometimes the self- references are just lazy or parochial. On situation comedies, characters make jokes about other situation comedies. In Stephen King's fiction, a character in a quandary "thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head," and a forest "seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums." Then there are the stranger entertainments about entertainment, from the small army of Elvis impersonators to the TV game show Puttin' On the Hits, on which ordinary folks lip-sync pop songs. With Entertainment...
...moments of leonine power, and Vanessa Redgrave is striking as his treacherous sister. But the rest of the all-star cast--including Hannah Schygulla, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Mel Ferrer--is lost in the pageantry. Edward Anhalt's script is flabby and inert, and history is contaminated with hokey invention (a bogus meeting in London, for instance, between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton...
...gadgets and toward a kind of timeless, spacy mysticism. In the late 1940s streamlining and art-deco angularity were abandoned in favor of more approximate, biomorphic forms from nature--lamps shaped like bubbles, coffee tables shaped like amoebas. Too bad. The slick Radio City elegance had been a bit hokey, but at least each object made obvious sense: hard angles, parallel lines and parabolas are precise, mathematically simple. Except for the work of a very few artists, such as Isamu Noguchi, most biomorphic furniture is like free verse, the lines undisciplined and arbitrary...
Andy Griffith gives a suitable hokey performance as a misguided bad guy and Patrick Wayne displays a suitable honesty as the misguided good guy that the bad guys hire. There's not much to work with, though. The characters are two-dimensional, which makes things difficult for the actros and deadly dull for the audience...