Word: cliched
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...right or a responsibility?" This is familiar territory for Democrats. The question was framed many years ago by Senator Ted Kennedy, who must have been smiling up on Cape Cod. "Health care should be a right, not a privilege," Kennedy would say, so often that it became a cliché. But it was unfamiliar turf for John McCain, who responded by wandering through his answer - halfheartedly, it seemed - saying it would be his responsibility as President to provide affordable health care to those who needed...
...witty marathon sentences and then flipped to the author photo of a young man willing himself to look older - like every fake I.D. picture ever taken - were powerless: they had to dub him the next literary voice of his generation. It's exactly the kind of over-enthusiastic cliché Wallace was so good at examining and twisting and footnoting into an ironic tangent, and it was that distrust for pat declarations and easy praise that made him such a terrific non-fiction writer...
...Ought to be, but isn't. That the movie proves to be a nonevent has something to do with the clichés accruing around the cop genre (where the killer is always a cop), and more to do with the passing of time. Director Jon Avnet - who's done some decent work (The War) but was also responsible for this year's lamentable 88 Minutes, also starring Pacino - gives the new movie the grimy New York look and a generic intensity. Yet this is a film that missed its moment. Instead of the meeting of maestros...
...obviously a gold-digger, so entirely without redeeming traits. It's hard to believe that any sensible man, let alone a master of the Wall Street universe, would take such a creature out for a drink, let alone marry her, even back in 1936. She was a vulgar cliché when she rolled out of Luce's typewriter and neither time nor Diane English has improved...
...sleek précis of the Bush failures and John McCain's complicity. "Eight [years] is enough," he said. It was time for a change. His stories of the problems of the people he met along the way, the collateral damage of the Bush presidency, came closest to cliché - they weren't nearly as convincing as the stunning parade of Average Americans that preceded his speech, including a laid-off factory worker named Barney Smith who delivered the immortal line, "We need a government that cares more about Barney Smith than Smith Barney...