Word: seems
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Christmas tree." The sight of the officer bleating out the song in a steak joint as livestock baa in the background is silly (and desperate) enough to be mildly amusing. Still, it's the sort of scene that you know has been done before--a feeling we seem to get often; a class nerd gets shoved into a locker, carollers disperse before an advancing runaway sleigh, the mistletoe scene, etc. It's a patchwork of cliched moments from other movies or sitcoms--all stapled together into a disjointed Christmas special with absolutely no flow...
...gimmick here is that all the bands are comprised of teenagers, representing the sway these movies hold on today's adolescents. Considering the band members represent a generation that wasn't even old enough to go to the cinema without their parents when these movies came out, this may seem odd--but then, perhaps because they weren't actual teens, they were able to take the often mushy emotions in both the movies and their accompanying soundtracks at face value...
...loses its longing tone. If you ignored the liner notes, you might think you were hearing a bootleg recording of '80s cover bands: few of the bands display any trace of '90s influence, and none dares to be snarky or ironic. Yet in playing it straight, they can't seem to match, let alone outdo, the original levels of emotion...
...admit, in spite of all that carping, this album put a smile on my face. But it also made me reach for my CD collection and look for the originals. If the bands' aim was exposure, as the addresses of their record companies in the liner notes seems to indicate, a better strategy might have been to distinguish themselves and not parrot the originals--the ready-made market for '80s nostalgia would mean they would have gotten heard anyway. As it stands, however, In Their Eyes comes across as an album trying to ride on the coattails...
...contrast in character between the two couples is exaggerated in performance. Charbonneau and Beard--as Nancy and Charlie--tend to put so much effort into their dispositions that they seem unrealistic. Nancy's sarcasm is so affected that it seems sincere, and Charlie's complacency is too noticeable to be the subtle characterization it ought to be. He looks quite like a little boy in adult's clothing, wearing shoes a little too big for his personality. Nancy instead has a little girl's saccharine, irritating voice inside a matronly visage. On the other hand, Leslie and Sarah--Kelleher...