Word: hokeyness
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...where she last displayed her talents--prone--in Smokey and the Bandits. In Norma Rae, Ritt allows Fields aging starlet cuteness to work for her. A sassy, kick-around mill worker, Norma Rae is a woman cashing in on the vestiges of squirrel-mouthed, cheerleader prettiness. The story is hokey, but it plays. Widowed by a beer brawl and left with two children, one illegitimate, Norma Rae is trapped in a one-industry, two-bit, sexist little town. She marries a muscle-bound teddy-bear, but she only comes to value herself through a friendship with a New York...
Field's performance however derives much of its power from the screenplay written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.--it's hokey as hell but it plays. Motivated by a magazine article by Henry F. Leifermann, the screenplay delineates the growing bond between Norma Rae, a hard-assed little cracker and Reuben (Ron Leibman) a New York Jewish labor organizer who comes down to unionize her factory. Refreshingly, their bond stems not from wild, trans-ethnic couplings but from a shared philosophy towards life. Ravetch and Frank use humor, wit and most of all, respect in their screenplay...
...portrayed literally, Claude's odyssey to self-awareness would be as hokey as Hollywood's "trip" movies of the '60s, like Easy Rider. Instead, Hair presents the decade in the terms of balletic myth. The passions of a generation are poured into a single setting, Central Park, on a single enchanted night. The park becomes an idealized, but never sentimentalized, recreation of the brief-lived Utopias that once sprang up in Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the East Village. Yet Weller does not get carried away by his conceit. His characters talk like people, not platitudinous flower children...
...begins and ends in a pious condemnation of street life from a traditional, middle-class, Midwestern, Protestant perspective--a perspective which seems as foreign to Schrader as California is to Scott's bewildered father. Schrader's prototypes of middle class life, Grand Rapids, is nothing but a collection of hokey cliches. In the first five minutes, we see sledding kids, skating kids, kids watching TV, kids delivering the newspaper, daddies shoveling the sidewalk, mommy driving the car. Then comes religion--the snowy church, icons on the wall, grace before dinner, and discussions of sin among the men. The images peak...
...from silliness into bad taste is the writer's pretentiousness. Not only does he trivialize marriage and sex for cheap one-liners, but he also manages to plunder the social history of three decades. In Slade's hands, even the Viet Nam War is a cue for hokey costume gags and mechanical changes of dramatic pace. The man has no shame...