Word: schlock
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...Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies; after spending several exasperating hours at that book, I put it down never wanting to see the word “fun” used in a review ever again. Wielding that one word, she justifies the least entertaining schlock and pisses on compelling and unpretentious masterworks. That’s certainly her right, but her attitude has borne a body of work whose opinions I hardly ever agree with—and if I do, it’s usually for different reasons...
...Just how Cats, the most successful musical in Broadway history (and an adventurous one in its day) has come to be a synonym for mass-audience schlock is the subject for another day. The real question is why the critics are so eager to turn Taboo into Rosie O?Donnell?s personal Titanic. I liked Taboo when I saw it in London a year and a half ago. And I liked it on Broadway, though it is much changed - in some ways for the better and some for the worse...
...disco props didn’t totally interfere with the sentimental schlock that is Fiddler for some, especially during the love song “Miracle of Miracles?...
...From schlock überproducer Rodger Corman and first-time writer-director Francis Ford Coppola, comes this intriguingly novel look at the familiar axe-murderer-haunts-a-family-because-of-secrets-that-won’t-stay-buried genre. Startling heart attack aside, the opening scene is strangely lovely and serves to sets up the heroine’s very real moral conflict. Although the blonde-haired beauties are visually interchangeable—courtesy of their cookie-cutter cheerleader good looks and the graininess of the black and white photography—their characterizations are nuanced. Although he was hired...
However, the music is clearly meant to complement the movie’s kung-fu schlock. Without the movie’s visual hi-jinks, the collection of songs comes across obscure and often bizarre: take Zamfir’s four-minute flute rendition of “The Lonely Shepard”, or “Crane / White Lightning” by RZA and Charles Berenstein, which sounds like the street fighter version of an Ennio Morricone piece...