Word: stale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...movie, and there wouldn't be one if the characters didn't do implausible things. Hence the creakiest gimmick in all of fiction, the HIBK (Had I But Known) ploy. It worked in Oedipus Rex, but in the intervening 2,500 years the trope has got a bit stale. Here it's applied so that the movie can be 98 mins. instead...
...during my first night in Paris. In the morning, after being prematurely roused by Australian backpackers and still-drunk Brazilians, I doddered down to the lobby for a complimentary breakfast and a second rude awakening. My illusions of Paris were quickly shattered during that meal: not only by the stale croissant, but by the horrors of MTV France.I had arrived in the patrie of Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, and Daft Punk—and in the summer of Justice, no less, the Parisian duo whose “D.A.N.C.E.” was omnipresent in America at the time...
...When I first signed to Tommy Boy, [the A&R person] would take us to different shows and to art museums," says Q-Tip. "There was real mentorship. Today that's largely absent, and we see the results in the music and in the aesthetic." That result is a stale product, defined by cable channels like BET, now owned by Viacom, which seems to consist primarily of gun worship and underdressed women...
...that real life isn't an Agatha Christie novel. Stories end; life goes on. "I can feel the weariness of certain mechanisms that are resorted to in conventional films," he told a journalist. "I think those mechanisms are false." The old formulas had become as stylized as kabuki, as stale as week-old breadsticks. Hollywood stuck to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, but Antonioni didn't see why he had to. How about, in L'Avventura, boy-loses-girl, boy-finds-another-girl-and- gives-up-searching-for-the-first-girl? (In fact, the film...
...effect that inevitably accompanies life abroad is not unlike the elements in Ireland. Insight can come in droplets, dashes, steady cascades, and bursts and deluges. Some lessons and memories can be shaken off, but the total effect of the experience stays with you forever, clinging like the smell of stale must...