Word: stalest
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...water. The unfortunate truth is that many books written by non-Western novelists in English—especially those by South Asian authors—rely on the equivalent of camels for effect, peppering works with spices and ceremonies, arranged marriages and zany in-laws: in short, deploying the stalest, most predictable tropes in the Orientalist handbook. Book reviewers stateside pat themselves on the back for compassing “world literature”; arts supplements splash their fronts with selections of the month like Anita Desai’s “Fasting, Feasting” or Aravind Adiga?...
...probably the stalest cliche in show business, so much so that one thinks maybe it's ripe for re-examination. Let's stipulate that great comedy - like great anything - is difficult. But it seems to me that creating OK comedy, the sort of thing that allows you to pass an idle Saturday night pleasantly, if not memorably, is not necessarily a life-threatening activity...
...relevant story but told through a man who morphs from insufferably confident hawk to insufferably righteous dove. Fortunately, Spader has built a career on making creepy soullessness intriguing. Ellsberg compares the quagmire to quicksand: it's the stalest cliche imaginable, yet Spader sells it with his bitter, weary delivery. Later, after a fact-finding trip to the front line, he says he learned "we couldn't win unless ..." He trails off, and in that moment you see his brashness silently shatter. There is no "unless...
Sure. But to involve us with its characters and its inevitable happy ending, the movie requires some interruption--unexpected dizziness, a crazy comic outburst--that would disrupt its complacent reliance on the stalest of conventions...
...Favorite Year's innocuousness has its virtues: because of the film's eagerness to please, even the stalest jokes and cliches have a short half-life, and evoke a comfortable haze of nostalgia as they decay. The directing also comes a pleasant surprise. While always irritating and oily as an actor. Richard Benjamin turns out to be quite skillful behind the camera. He doesn't overwhelm with individual touches, but he does keep things moving deftly along, and he has had the good sense to let O'Toole follow his own course. My Favorite Year was produced by Mel Brooks...