Word: tropes
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...director, Robert Luketic, who did the very agreeable Legally Blonde (written by two of this movie's screenwriters), falls down big time here. He gets no connection, let alone chemistry, between the two leads, and he botches that obligatory romantic-comedy trope, the falling-in-love-on-the-dance-floor scene. (The film's one decent moment: an elevator kiss.) And as long as he's doing an R-rated comedy, shouldn't he observe one off the genre's cardinal rules and have someone go topless? If not Heigl, then Butler, whose magnificently bulked-up chest...
Judge Sonia Sotomayor may have been something of an exception. Like previous nominees, during her confirmation hearings she displayed some aspects of her judicial philosophy - but perhaps not all of them. Adopting a trope more often associated with conservatives than liberals, she said repeatedly that judges should simply apply the law, not legislate from the bench. "My judicial philosophy," she declared in her opening statement, is simple: "fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make law. It is to apply the law." And as if to dispel any impression that this was rhetorical boilerplate, Sotomayor...
...Ghana, young people make up over half of the population," Obama said on his African stop. "The world will be what you make of it." The same refrain was repeated in Cairo and is a feature of his rhetoric elsewhere. As politics, addressing the youth is a well-worn trope. But for Obama it points to a bigger hope: that the change he speaks about will ultimately be generational, and therefore more lasting...
...That hasn’t stopped it from trying. By now, the phenomenon of “positive psychology” has become a fairly tired trope. But when it burst onto the scene in the late ’90s, it seemed like something entirely new, poised to provide innovative answers to the really big questions. With its fusion of self-help and brain science, it was perfectly calculated to appeal to soul-searching undergrads desirous of something a touch more quantitative than Nietzsche. A lecture course taught by Tal Ben-Shahar...
...that's where we are right now. The recession, provoked by the sudden, essentially cold-turkey abandonment of spending, lending and borrowing, is something like our national equivalent of the jitters, sweats and seizures that addicts experience right after they give up the junk. Actually, the applicable addiction trope is more like food (or sex) than drugs or booze, since as economic creatures, we can't quit; we just have to teach ourselves to buy and borrow in moderate, healthier ways. The new America must be about financial temperance, not abstinence...