Word: expressionist
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...standard set of college gear falls into several spheres, depending on your personal taste: "interesting artsy decorations" (German Expressionist prints, obscure band posters, Dali), "I'm holding out on adulthood toys" (Star Wars action figures, Muppet collectibles, the Magic 8 Ball, anything from the JFK Street level of Urban Outfitters), and "sexually suggestive paraphrenalia" (massage oil, Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World, whips, handcuffs). Invite the person to sit down on the bed with you so that they can get a good look at your stuff, and let the good times roll...
EVEN AMONG FAMOUS ARTISTS there are degrees of neglect. Nobody could call the Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline overlooked. Not when his pictures have sold for a million dollars and up. Not with his signature style recognizable in an eye blink, the black girderlike slashes on the white ground. But compared with Jackson Pollock, who has been a household word -- well, in some households anyway -- for the past quarter-century, Kline is positively obscure. It's like comparing Sal Mineo with James Dean. Both were in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, but only one of them car-smashed...
There is no point in pretending that Poussin is an easy painter for today's viewers to get at. He has the disadvantage, for a coarsely expressionist culture, of being incapable of vulgarity or cheap sentiment. His pictures don't reach out across 3 1/2 centuries to diddle your heartstrings. His imagery springs from qualities of feeling and modes of thought that are now almost extinct: educated piety, allegory and complete familiarity not only with the Bible and the Greek and Latin classics from Homer to Ovid, Horace and Plutarch, but also with their Renaissance descendants, such as Tasso...
...found at the Goodwill, actually evokes aspects of the previous three decades. Most especially you should not be musing about why a movie that wants to be a funny social commentary -- the press kit hopefully evokes the names of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges -- is shot in the impersonal expressionist manner that was literally foreign to these American masters, a style that was favored by glum and self-important German directors like Fritz Lang...
...comparative is where you compare any element of the film to any other element of any earlier film. If you are a pretentious critic, your references should be as obscure or as foreign as possible. For example: "The moody tone of the film was evocative of the German Expressionist style of the 1920s, best expressed in 'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." If you are a populist critic tie it in to the season's big hit: "This was another "Jurassic Park," Only without the dinosaurs...