Word: metaphoric
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...Sports remain, particularly for American males, our dominant social metaphor. Our lives are guided, more than we dare admit, by the hope of winning, the fear of losing and the belief that we everywhere compete on level playing fields - even though the media almost daily instructs us that this is pure fantasy. That's why the doping scandals so outrage us and the reports of rapacious behavior by athletes so dismay us. We have a primitive need for tales about the walk-on who makes the team, the aging jock who summons the idealistic spirit of boyhood and wins...
...Ciao, America!, his U.S. best seller, Severgnini was writing for Italians - translating them was an afterthought. "This time it was the other way around. Bella was written for an international audience," he says, even though Italians got first crack at reading it last year. In a typically culinary metaphor, Severgnini says: "It's like when you cook a good meal for your fiancée and your friends love it." In La Bella Figura, he takes us on a 10-day whirlwind tour of the country. A purposeful but ever-playful host, he stops in Tuscany to poke...
...whole Hoover bunch piles into a Volkswagen bus so that Olive can take her shot at the Miss Sunshine crown. The vehicle is a perfect symbol of the family's tenuous grip on reality: only the third and fourth gears are functioning. That metaphor is pitch-perfect, but the film works a little too hard at proving the vileness of beauty pageants. When the M.C. (Matt Winston) croons God Bless America into the contestants' innocent ears, he pretty much summarizes American awfulness. It is a broad and fertile field, and the Hoover family plows it desperately in a comedy that...
...joke in this cunning debut film is not that a hard-boiled detective yarn is spun out in a modern high school and peopled mostly by teenagers. It's that the joke is not a joke at all but a pertinent metaphor for that vulnerable time of life when every street looks mean, every love affair could be fatal. Written in 1997, shot in 2003 (for less than $500,000) and finally released early this year, Brick is so handsomely made, so insolently assured, that you have to wonder what took the moneymen so long to realize that Johnson...
...even though both candidates have decided to talk mostly about other things-a metaphor, perhaps, for the nation's traumatic paralysis over the Mesopotamian disaster. Lieberman's diffidence is understandable. His unflinching support for the war isn't very popular with even his strongest supporters. But Lamont seems almost as reticent. A few days earlier, I'd watched the challenger chug through an entire speech to an Indian-American group without talking about Iraq. "I didn't even talk about the war!" he said with pseudo amazement when he began to take questions. The challenger obviously is out to prove...