Word: hokeyness
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Leno would probably love the spinning song wheel, a towering and hokey trick that exercises an unhealthy fascination with Elvis. I've seen the damn thing three times now, and it's never been effective. It does provide a certain comic amusement for the first three minutes, but after that it bogs down the show as people have to be selected out of the audience to spin...
...contrast to the engrossing banalities of People's Court, the newer shows are filled with hokey courtroom theatrics. Defendants leap to their feet to protest adverse testimony, judges are portrayed as benevolent father figures ("This job sure gets to you once in a while," muttered Superior Court's Burns after one tough decision), and surprise witnesses abound. Viewers of Divorce Court have grown accustomed to salacious testimony that borders on parody. (Cross-examining lawyer to grocery delivery boy: "Aren't you the one ^ who propositioned Mrs. Cullen at the produce department, saying she was 'ripe and ready to eat?' " Delivery...
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...