Word: mawkishly
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...losing someone you love shouldn't be any less universal than finding someone to love, but it tends to be such an inwardly focused experience - most of us just hole up in pajamas and mope - that it's an enormous challenge to portray on film without teetering into the mawkish. Which unfortunately, is just what The Greatest does...
This territory could get mawkish fast but for the muscular energy of Keegan's prose. It works in bursts--short, punchy clauses and chapters--and Pip's voice is wryly comic, even when events turn tragic. When things go well, she's gloriously, darkly intuitive. (Here she is on the Olympic podium: "The national anthem starts to wail, creating a dreaded musical pressure in my chest as the flag slowly rises in a celebrating-the-dead kind of way. Something churns and my mind says: Wow! This is exactly like a giant funeral!") And for a world-class swimmer...
...experiment, some people were asked to watch the last few mawkish minutes of the 1979 film The Champ, which involves a dying boxer and his wailing boy. Others watched a dry nature clip. Subjects induced to feel sad were willing to spend significantly more money on a sporty insulated water bottle offered for purchase postviewing. "This void of loss people feel makes them want to fill it up with something," says Keltner--and often that means spending a little more for a luxury item. This doesn't mean you should take on a second mortgage, 2006-style, but it wouldn...
...From his dramatic overseas trip to his high-profile meetings at home, Obama is aggressively seeking out stronger political environments than McCain is. Part of McCain's problem: his numerous fund-raising requirements limit his schedule. A glut of media attention for Obama and a McCain campaign video of mawkish journalists fawning over the Democrat appeared to galvanize the press corps into reassessing its Obamamania, much as a February Saturday Night Live spoof caused it to make a slight midcourse correction during the Clinton-Obama nomination fight...
...something like that. People like to complain that irony is the bane of 21st century culture, but don't forget sincerity. Emin's admirers say that her critics fail to understand that she's requiring us to confront and discard our fastidious disdain for sentimentality. After seeing this mawkish work, you'll want to hold on to that disdain...