Word: slavish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American genre tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse gloss on the darkly romantic (and wildly oversimplified) dialectic by which people have for ages tried...
Even trendiness itself, or at least the slavish chronicling of consumer ephemera, has the taint of the passe. Many magazines that served as arbiters of hipness have gone out of business, including Egg, 7 Days, Smart and Fame. In the meantime, Vanity Fair thrives by sticking to cover subjects that have the rosy glow of maturity: Farrah and Ryan, Sly Stallone, Madonna. At the same time, such magazines as Workbench, Homeowner and 1001 Home Ideas are briskly building up their circulation. One of the hottest newcomers is Countryside, a Hearst glossy about the virtues of conservation, rural landscapes and life...
Nothing is wrong with comfortable clothing. It's just that current usage is more reflective of a slavish conformity than a desire for ease. No generation has strained harder than ours to affect a casual, relaxed, cool look; none has succeeded more spectacularly in looking as though it had been stamped out by cookie cutters. The attempt to avoid any appearance of being well groomed or even neat has a quality of desperation about it and suggests a calculated and phony deprivation. We shun conventionality, but we put on a uniform to do it. An appearance of alienation...