Word: tropes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...street [during the Monica Lewinsky scandal], already a perp"), Morrison should reread the article she wrote for the New Yorker to see her original reasons [May 19]. They do not in any way resemble what she says now. Clinton, she wrote in October 1998, "displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." Morrison should be more careful with words, since words are her profession. A. K. Barsotti, Las Vegas
...just (just!) a trilogy that both tapped the innocent vigor of old B-movie serials and turned them into sophisticated thrill machines. Raiders and its progeny were fun without being facetious; they moved with the speed and power of an Indy right hook, relentlessly piling one cool action trope on another. And at their heart was a hero who wore his machismo lightly, whether he was ending a face-off with a saber-wielding villain by shooting him or coping with his mortal fear of snakes...
...little accident at a local power station: his body has been magnetized, and when he touches the video boxes he instantly erases all the tapes, rendering them useless. The demand by a stern lady of the neighborhood, Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow, a living connection to the Zelig trope), to watch Ghostbusters sends the guys scurrying to make their own 20-min. version of the old Bill Murray comedy, and finish it by nightfall...
...speech got little attention when Edwards first tried it out in Des Moines, Iowa, on Dec. 29. Delivered from behind a lectern, the "two Americas" refrain sounded like the familiar trope of class warfare. "One America does the work while another America reaps the reward," Edwards intoned. "One America pays the taxes while another America gets the tax breaks." But as Edwards took it on the road-into living rooms and union halls and diners and high school gyms-it grew and evolved into something much, much bigger, into a cause. "The more I talked about it, the more...
...reason is: they're in a 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...