Word: tropes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zhang's films capture struggle and pain without victimizing the subject. Zhang reduces life to its most basic elements-the individual and the interpersonal--and makes moments timeless. Unlike China's more commercial directors such as Feng Xiaogang, Zhang is not trying to play to a popular trope but to create a work of art that "could be seen 500 years ago or 500 years in the future and still be relevant...
Doesn't this look like a cynical mix of every indie trope of the past few years? Guys on the run, heartland town, a goofy pageant, the career-gal blues. Oh, and some real gay people. All of which proves there's nothing new under the sun. And nothing so original as a writer who can make comic haute cuisine out of the ingredients for hash...
...original idea was to surround this story of three kids, lost and grumpy in the woods, with other pseudodocumentary filler: archival material on the witch legend, interviews with local police officers and friends of the missing students, all tied together by a suitably questing narrator. The trope is familiar enough, both from that oxymoronic phrase "reality TV" and from fake-umentary murder movies, such as the 1979 Cannibal Holocaust and the current Drop Dead Gorgeous. The Last Broadcast, a slick thriller assembled on a desktop computer in 1997 for--get this--$900, mixes interviews and "found footage" in its story...
...seem farfetched, but that's precisely what Microsoft charged. On Day Two of the trial, lead Microsoft lawyer John Warden accused Boies of trying to "demonize Bill Gates" and of casting Microsoft as "the great Satan." Bill Gates as Beelzebub is actually a familiar trope in computerland. The Internet is filled with discussion groups debating whether Gates is the devil and Microsoft the Evil Empire. Search the Web for sites that pair the words Gates and Satan, and you'll turn up tens of thousands of hits. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig was a court-appointed monitor in an earlier...
...with "Angelene," the dry testimony of a world-wise hooker who longs for a lover "two thousand miles away," a yawn of separation that "lays open like a road." The figures in Harvey's tales rarely have access to the lovers they want, but Is This Desire? lends the trope a new layer of richness. Surely we should not ignore that Angelene both scans and rhymes with Polly Jean, and that an album whose title is a question must necessarily begin as a quest. After all, it is not the lover (who may, in fact, be imaginary) but the miles...