Word: tropes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many, the War on Christmas is a hyperbolic construct that blows the problem out of proportion. "There is no war on Santa," Michelle Goldberg wrote on Salon.com in 2005. "What there is, rather, is the burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union." According to Max Blumenthal, who published a recent article on the topic, the trope's persistent popularity is fed by financial opportunism: "The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry in a shrinking economy, providing an effective boost...
...dense with imagery. So the big surprise in The Wrestler is that it's visually inert. Aronofsky's main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.) The trope does pay off later in the film, when the camera trails the briefly retired Randy down the stairs to his new job, behind a deli counter. But Aronofsky's main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero...
...Today, the speech is often read as a proclamation of “the American Dream,” the idea that men can go from nothing to something—as Douglass himself did—if only they would work hard enough. This whole Rags-to-Riches trope, says Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestsellers “Blink” and “The Tipping Point,” is actually nothing more than a pipe dream. In his new book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Gladwell tries to dispel...
...Surfer Rosa,” Fugazi’s “13 Songs,” and Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation.” But while those albums all self-consciously operated around or even subverted the tropes and conventions of “pop” music in their own different ways, today’s independent music seems to be working deliberately in the opposite direction. Indie’s current incarnation—the Pitchfork generation—insists, almost to an iconoclastic extent, on wearing the vestments of that...
...proclaimed second coming of Christ, who says “two angels” spoke to him. Maher’s response, “You mean two guys named Angel,” elicits from Miranda the shell-shocked expression that becomes the film’s dominant trope...