Word: overfamiliarity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like to acknowledge; it is merely endured. That ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," wouldn't seem a curse to a journalist. Editors deal in novelty and discovery; the negative and less talked-about side of this is knowing when to spare the reader the overfamiliar. Newsweek editors were once oddly attached to a cynical acronym, MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), applied to subjects they didn't want to hear more about. But anticipatory boredom can lead to being sated by a subject without having fully explored it. When the news trails...
...dull TV performer. As the first effective television President, Kennedy proved how important it was to be fast on his feet. This helped to set a demanding new standard that elevates flash over sub stance. The effect of television - which in one year can make an unknown face tiresomely overfamiliar - has been to disqualify able but uncharismatic men, and to make others (Humphrey and Muskie come to mind) glib parodies of their once more impressive selves...
...parodies that enliven the film: a lunatic TV game show that caters openly to voyeurism; an earnest and dimwitted documentary explicating the medical and psychological problems of Siamese twins. De Palma's New York location work, as it has in the past, reveals facets of an overfamiliar urban landscape untouched by other film makers...
...Ford as if he were anatomizing the canon of Yeats. Ford, director of classic Americana from Stagecoach to The Grapes of Wrath to The Last Hurrah, is an artist of enormous sweep. But he has been guilty of certain venial sins, among them boozy sentimentality and the use of overfamiliar stock characters. In Bogdanovich's eyes every blemish is a virtue, and no detail is too trivial to examine. He traces, for example, the history of a gesture first used by Harry Carey and later mimicked by John Wayne. Far more interesting than the critical narrative are four interviews...
Keaton's career crisis was the overfamiliar chronicle of the silent-screen star undone by talkies. Alcoholism and poverty followed the decline. It was not until the '50s that he was rediscovered and merchandised in Ford commercials and films like Beach Blanket Bingo. Such travesties are happily omitted from the Rohauer restoration. Instead, there are the fabulous originals, now preserved on celluloid stock -works like The General, a Civil War comedy which could have been photographed by Mathew Brady, and the complex and hilarious Navigator, deservedly Keaton's biggest moneymaker...