Word: theming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bromance--that thriving genre of the male-bonding comedy--expands geometrically and devolves predictably in The Hangover, a buddy farce designed to attract the lonely teen boys who think they're too cool for a Will Ferrell dinosaur movie. Taking the multiple-amnesia theme from the 2006 melodrama Unknown and referencing about a dozen movies set in Las Vegas, it revels in the hectic display of rude elements (sexual and ethnic stereotyping, pedophile gags, inappropriate people with their pants off) that have made the form as rigid in its conventions as Kabuki theater...
When kids play games, they pretend to be adults: soldiers, spacemen, cops and robbers or, for the more precocious, doctors and nurses. The theme is, Be what you want to be. Then when they grow up, go to Hollywood and make movies, they often create characters that are emotional adolescents, infants, kids. The credo of so many action films and comedies is, Be what you used to be or what you still, secretly, are. This tendency could be the film industry's wise acknowledgment that inside every adult is a backward child ruled by fears and cravings. Or it could...
...unusual tone. "Let's be completely honest," it begins. "No company wants to go through this ..." If starting with contrition is an attention grabber, especially for a chest-thumping car company, even more so are the images that flash across the screen as the ad turns to its next theme: "Reinvention is the only way we can fix this, and fix it we will," the narrator intones over footage of people streaming out of public transport, a runner with a prosthetic leg, a hockey player felled in the agony of defeat. Finally the spot urges viewers to just get past...
...Richness of Experience The first speech in which Sotomayor introduced the "wise Latina" theme was delivered in Puerto Rico in 1994 and focused not on race but on gender. Sotomayor was responding to an article written by a colleague, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, a federal judge in New York. Cedarbaum, like Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was an "equal treatment" feminist, who had expressed concern about the premise that women judges necessarily approach cases differently than men do. "Generalizations about the way women or men are," Ginsburg famously said, "cannot guide me reliably in making decisions...
...When I found one, that would be a good day," he says. At his camp, it "was normal for the prison guards to be cruel. No one had hope or cared about anything," says Kim, who was finally released. The camps' pervasive sense of hopelessness is a common theme woven through many defectors' accounts, says Peters. "Any sense of justice is completely absent," he says. "People often don't even know what their crime is. It is really grim stuff...