Word: hokeyness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BEST SPORTS MOVIE I ever saw was Pride of the Yankees, the 1942 tribute to Lou Gehrig featuring Gary Cooper as the ill-fated Yankee great. It was hokey and soapy, almost completely unrelated to the realities of major league sports, but it was still a lot of fun. That, in the long run, has to be the main criterion for judging sports movies. With a very few exceptions, these films don't aim at bringing any important theme to an audience. In an era of incredibly mindless films, sports movies remain in the fore of anti-intellectualism. The people...
...playlands of the past, where gambling, boozing and whoring were as rife as popcorn and pizza, most theme parks promote soft drinks and fast foods. They dispense a dizzily dyspeptic array of instant edibles from storefronts with names like Yum Yum Palace, Mustard's Last Stand and the Hokey Pokey. Heroic exceptions to the no-brew stand-up eating syndrome are the Busch Gardens, near Williamsburg, Va., and Tampa, Fla. Since both parks are also the sites of Anheuser-Busch breweries, and their owners are understandably interested in promoting suds consumption, both spots have "hospitality centers" that actually give...
...terraced nightclubs, the carmine-lipped girls with padded shoulders, the hokey production number with the star swiveling down an immense abstract staircase-they're all here. But why? Half the time Scorsese is sending them up, and the other half trying to cash them in at face value for a dividend of unearned nostalgia...
Onetime Georgia Governor Lester Maddox no longer sells fried chicken; now he dishes out country ham. That about sums up the hokey singing-and-comedy act that Maddox, 61, tried out on patrons of Mr. P's Supper Club in Sanford, Fla. The man who in 1964 waved a pistol at blacks who tried to desegregate his Atlanta restaurant told a few corny jokes, played the harmonica and belted out Casey Jones and Dixie in a gravelly baritone. The crowd loved it. One reason, perhaps, was that Maddox's fellow songster and guitar accompanist was Bobby Lee Fears...
...moment of revelation. This is why written humor, deprived of an active context, so often fails. This is why the expression "Ha-ha" appears so pathetic on the page. This is why laying down "laugh-tracks" on sit-coms is like forcing an elephant to do the Hokey-Pokey while spanning the rails in Park St. Under (a game young hooligans call "Shredding the Elephant"). The attempt to institutionalize anarchy deprives anarchy of its essence, and like all large animals, the institution has a tendency to evolve into a grey amblypod with a withered proboscis: prodded by clowns and stampeded...