Word: mawkish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bound to be a smash hit with the American public, not just because it is full of the yearning sentimentality that has flooded into real life today--for there is a connection between Burne-Jones' semisacrificial English virgins, each one a Flower Beneath the Foot, and the emetically mawkish victim-cult of the late Princess Diana--but because its artfulness evokes intense nostalgia...
With its ever increasing penchant for mawkish soap opera and garish costuming (and no one is a bigger culprit here than Kulik), figure skating has become camp spectacle. Perhaps as a corrective, the judges of the men's competition sent the message that skating is indeed still an earnest sport where fierce athleticism matters. In other words, yes, the much discussed quadruple jump counts. Of the top medal contenders, only two skaters, Kulik and Alexei Yagudin, also a Russian, attempted one, and only Kulik landed his: a perfectly executed quadruple toe loop...
...even these exemplary cases suffer from the cloying taint of kitsch. Close Encounters reaches an anticlimax with its hackneyed vision of dainty space guys trooping out of the mother ship. Contact cannot explain its scientist-heroine's obsession without mawkish flashbacks to her childhood as an orphan; and when she finally meets the Vegans, they take the shape of long-lost Dad--to make it "easier" for her. Apparently our kind can handle only so much strangeness at a time: we travel for light-years, down through the raging chaos of cosmic wormholes, only to arrive...
None of this is likely to prevent the White House from setting up a Contrition War Room, polling every historical grievance to determine mawkish priority. I can't wait to see how Clinton handles Sally Hemings or watch him apologize to the Puritans for Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter...
Viewers were aghast. No, not at TV hostess KATHIE LEE GIFFORD's mawkish reports of her son Cody's every hiccup and hangnail. They're used to that. Last week, however, labor activist Charles Kernaghan testified in Congress that the Wal-Mart clothing line bearing Kathie Lee's name is stitched together by children in Honduras who work for 31 cents an hour. As co-host Regis Philbin flinched, Gifford launched into a teary, it's-not-my-fault, TV hissy fit: "You can say I'm ugly, you can say I'm not talented, but when...