Word: hokum
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...artistic risk taken by French Director Diane Kurys in this her first film is large. She wants to break free of the artificiality of plot, the storyteller's hokum in which the revelation of character is only incidental to the tedious march of exposition, complication, resolution. Director Jean-Charles Tacchella's likable Cousin. Cousine managed this difficult trick; it simply showed two ordinary but agreeable people falling in love and taking delight in each other, utterly without benefit of story. Kurys tries for the same artful simplicity. She introduces an appealing girl of 13 named Anne...
...even 60s-melodramatic; they once scheduled a concert in one Chicago hall and then performed in another. Today the Art Ensemble eschews formal theatrics, but they continue to affect a stage deportment that communicates--their movements can be stylized or abandoned, approaching sacred ceremony one moment and slapstick hokum the next. Jarman is the most consciously animated. During a drum solo he may turn his back and raise his arms as if in supplication or approach a microphone as if to sing but content himself with making faces at the levice. It is appropriate that the most memorable moments from...
...good cry, The Champ might seem a likely bet to deliver the goods. This movie has every tear-jerking device known to Hollywood, and then some. Its central characters are an adorable eight-year-old boy and his loving dad, a has-been boxer. The action is pure hokum. Will Dad throw off his addictions to gambling and booze and make a comeback in the ring? Will Dad's exwife, now a remarried society lady, try to regain custody of the son she once abandoned? Will Dad and Mom fall in love again? Will...
...simple-minded and morally undernourished as the genres require. You would hope for a great deal more from his best movies--the best, even, of this limited, specialized kind--than Carpenter may be capable of, but Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 are such neat packages of self-acknowledged hokum that it is difficult to resent or condescend to them. Compared to the slackness and swaggering middlebrow pretension of recent thrillers like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Last wave, they are remarkable for their stringent suspensefulness, their fundamental lack of conceit, the inventiveness of numerous details...
...Stop the Rain? Despite the nonsensical, Creedence Clearwater-derived (how do you say it? Hoool?) title, this is arguably the finest movie of the year, with barely a nod to the sentimental hokum that passes for sensitivity these days. Adapted from Robert Stone's award-winning novel about bringing Vietnam home--and with it, incidentally, two kilos of heroin. The film takes off and never lets up, sometimes reaching the point of nausea. Describing an Army campaign to murder elephants suspected of being NLF symps from helicopters, Michael Moriarty as John Converse says, "In a world where flying men hunt...