Word: conceited
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brooks plays a screenwriter, Steven Phillips, who, as everyone keeps telling him, has lost his edge. What he needs is a muse, who turns out to be a bubble-headed material girl (well played by Sharon Stone) who requires gifts from Tiffany in exchange for dopily delphic advice. The conceit is mildly amusing, but what Brooks actually seems to have lost is his comic rhythm. There's something distant and depressed about the film, which never develops the momentum it needs to link its occasional bright satiric moments into a convincing whole...
...granted the covenant of an everlasting priesthood, for zealously upholding the creed of his God. According to the current doctrine, Phineas Priests earn membership by killing or maiming homosexuals, Jews and anyone who is not white. There is no organization of Phineas Priests. In fact the order's conceit is that men act alone--not unlike the shooters in several historic episodes, including the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers--just as Furrow did last week...
Preposterous, you say. It would never work. But part of the weird genius of Bowfinger is that its central conceit never falls into total implausibility. At some point in the picture, you begin to see that this mad scheme is working. Or maybe it's just that you succumb to the enthusiasm with which Bobby and his associates perpetrate their...
...waits until the last minute is another matter, but that's the conceit director Garry Marshall obliges us to accept, and it's no more strained than the premise Roberts and Gere worked so successfully for him in Pretty Woman. They're all good at diversionary sleight-of-hand. Roberts' tentativeness is charming; she knows what she's doing, fights it, then succumbs with sad but perky resignation. Gere puts a nice flaky edge on his incisiveness. The supporting cast, led by Joan Cusack, surrounds them with funny common sense that doesn't fully assert itself until the happy...
Indeed, the poem is really accessible only at the emotional, abstract levels. "Understanding" this work would require a conceit of the reader that, I think, has gone out of style in all but the most responsible circles. Each sentence, at least, for readers with stretchier imaginations, does manage to stand on its own--it is the sentence that follows which makes no sense. While each stanza begins with a hint a plot (at times reassuringly contained in quotation marks), its thread is soon lost in a stream of inside-joke-like surreality, such that one imagines the Vivians must...