Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anyone who thinks romantic comedies are formulaic hokum is all too easily proved right. But everyone once in a while a gem like As Good As It Gets comes along to silence the cynics. Director James L. Brooks has crafted a warmhearted modern fable with a prickly sense of humor and, best of all, complicated and original characters. Beautifully acted and surprisingly quirky, As Good As It Gets is a feel good movie that you don't have to feel guilty to feel good about...
...Citing a number of other Massachusetts cases "where abuse obviously didn't take place," the attorney and former state ACLU head suggests child care experts are using "complete hokum parading as scientific testimony" to win over well-meaning juries. That's unlikely to wash with Mrs. Eappen, however. She maintains that Louise shook her baby to death ? and was responsible for his broken arm. "It makes me wonder what else she did to him that didn't leave a mark," she said...
...MOVIES . . . FIRST STRIKE: The plot Jackie Chan's new action film is standard spy hokum: he's caught in a nuclear arms chase involving the CIA, the former KGB and renegade merchants of death. It engrosses little and matters less. "As in musicals and porno films, it's the big numbers -- here the rampaging action scenes -- that carry a Chan movie," notes TIME's Richard Corliss. So see Jackie on killer stilts, Jackie jumping from a high ledge, Jackie battling in an aquarium stocked with great white (rubber) sharks. See, and marvel, as he fights off a dozen...
...Senate endorsed a budget blueprint, including a $1.5 billion payment on the Navy's third Seawolf attack submarine, which was created to track and destroy the Soviet navy, and is now rusting at pier side. And the Army's first rah-66 Comanche helicopter-designed to defeat Moscow's Hokum helicopter-rolled out of a Connecticut factory attended by bunting, a military band and a real, befeathered Comanche chief...
...group, these shows are a celebration of the nonexistent, a feast for the eyes and ears of the gullible. While some TV executives privately acknowledge that many of the subjects presented are pure hokum, they argue that the shows are entertaining and do no harm. "There's a seeker born every minute," puns Bradley Anderson, producer of Encounters. "The people who watch paranormal programming are looking for something to believe...