Word: motif
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...green, tan and brown. Retail experts credited America's military campaigns in Lebanon and Grenada for the trend. As a manufacturer told TIME in 1984, "I think many people wear military clothes because they feel proud of the U.S." To this day, consumers can find the familiar Woodland motif in oddly conspicuous colors - neon orange, bright red, hot pink - on everything from lingerie to toilet paper. Designers like Christian Dior and Nicole Miller have even created camo couture; witness the evening gown of shimmering sequins and blotchy earth tones...
...Echoes of Oz The movie stirs lots of cinematic echoes, some natural - Walt Disney's Dumbo was a touchstone for Docter - and some weird. The dragging of a large structure over rugged South American terrain is also a motif in the Werner Herzog epic Fitzcarraldo. A love story continued after death: Remember Ghost? Docter also cites Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, "the story of a solitary guy who reconnects with the world...
...happy life. It’s a reluctance to surrender these individual visions that fuels the collective fascination with one another’s failures. Suburban desperation is no new project for novelists and with his riskless and stilted prose, Amidon does little to build upon the motif. Tired and clunky language encumbers the novel, and thus, like the characters within, it never achieves its modest promise.The book opens with an alarm at Doyle Cutler’s house and, although nothing concrete has happened, it is clear that that Cutler is a man to look out for. Cutler...
...figures, Bacon spent a lifetime ransacking art history. From Poussin he took the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photos of wrestlers gave him a perennial motif--sex as sexual combat. He also drew from sources far outside art. One of his favorites was an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, movie stills and photographs of all kinds pinned to the walls of his studio and scattered on the floor...
...Vegas-bound tour group of elderly Manilow fans and having them stay at the same hotel as Jessica and Marcus is a quirk in the story that strays close to too convenient to ring true.Suspension of disbelief at his repeated appearances aside, the choice of Barry Manilow as a motif works toward the ongoing theme of Jessica at once decrying and embracing the maudlin. Just as she tries to take herself seriously, she’s brought down humorously.Conveyed directly, irony seems only a result of hyper-focused preoccupation with her own life. When the situations she finds herself...