Word: tropes
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Anti-Americanism is a potent political trope here because it is rooted in grievances. Just down the road from the Khomeini shrine is the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs' cemetery--one of many such scattered plots that contain the remains of more than 200,000 Iranian soldiers who died in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The widows and mothers who come here on Thursdays--the beginning of the weekend in Iran--to wash graves and pass out sweets and fruit to strangers remember that the rockets, jets and chemical weapons used to kill their sons and husbands were provided...
Opening with a close-up of an eye - a series trope and the very first shot of the first episode - "Previously on Lost" hits a number of familiar notes and includes oodles of inside jokes. The cell-phone ring is "You Are Everybody," by Charlie's rock band Drive Shaft. The office phone is answered with a Dharma Initiative-esque "Namaste!" And if we accept that fans can sometimes be the best critics, the skit takes the mickey out of two of the show's most overused transitions - the whooshing sound that indicates an imminent jump in time (either...
...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...