But big giant movie musicals tend to be aggressively mawkish.
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Emotion without purpose, without direction, immediately risks feeling mawkish and hollow.
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The emotional drama continues to succeed in spite of its mawkish tendencies.
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Yes, there's the risk of coming across as mawkish, but what's the alternative?
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It expanded a good but kinda mawkish pilot into something with larger ambitions.
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I will die in a mawkish and disconnected and ham-fisted and overacted fashion.
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A small thing, you might think, and let's not get mawkish about British rule.
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Firstly, I cannot stress enough how deeply mawkish, uninspired and rehashed Scott's cover is.
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A dollop of mawkish sentiment is to be expected in this kind of movie.
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I generally appreciated the tone of the editors, which is neither mawkish nor militaristic.
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The tone of the columns tended to be syrupy and mawkish, filled with false cheer.
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It's more surprising that it doesn't slow down the pace, or turn mawkish or hypocritical.
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While unbearably sad — but also beautiful — at times, the show is not mawkish or manipulative.
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"The Infinite Hotel" ends with the mawkish spectacle of a dead father holding his daughter.
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Inevitably, Richard Simmons showed up with a mawkish pitch for his "Deal-A-Meal" diet plan.
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Carell is a charming, maddening enigma, mawkish and mannered but always, somehow, a magnet for empathy.
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In fact, I couldn't stand it, especially the host, with his wimpy voice and mawkish homilies.
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The exhibit mostly resembles the mawkish sentiments of a Lifetime movie: melodrama without depth, expression without illumination.
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" Entertainment Weekly wrote that "this was a very strange debut, merging grim toughness with mawkish softening twists.
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The dark comedy's six episodes, all of which Gervais wrote and directed, whiplash between vicious and mawkish.
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Some songs veer into mawkish expressions of self-confidence and closure, and Kesha still dabbles in cultural appropriation.
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"Not Afraid," the mawkish self-help single from Recovery, announced a no-frills, self-consciously transparent new direction.
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Knowing America, the 9/11 remembrances will get more and more abstract and mawkish as time goes by.
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Never mawkish or contrived, it's an absolutely authentic depiction of how friendship can overcome adolescent anxiety and grief.
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I know such scenes can be mawkish and manipulative (Little Nell, etc.), but they get me every time.
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These days the duo's popularity is sometimes held against them, as if they were merely purveyors of mawkish schlock.
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The death of a child belonged to a different realm—that of a Greek tragedy or a mawkish movie.
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Right off the bat, it must be said that WWE tried very hard to make the whole thing mawkish.
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Unfortunately, Miller can't resist the impulse to tie Louis's messy tangle of woebegone threads into a tidy, mawkish bow.
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This may seem mawkish, but in the wake of Trump's hateful rhetoric, expressions of love and support are necessary.
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Like a very, very mawkish improv set, the episode struggles to insert all this information while moving the plot forward.
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He's like a surge of smoke from a monitor, a command line overload running in a mawkish, gut-wrenching collapse.
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So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.
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Fantasizing about seeing him when she visits the decayed remains of Lallybroch could feel mawkish if Ms. Balfe wasn't our anchor.
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Not a mawkish misery memoir, "Flat" records how a youthful couple tackles and transcends the daunting challenges of disease and treatment.
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The light touch that Cilea brings to bear, while preventing the drama from slipping into mawkish excess, sometimes feels musically thin.
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The duets when Ms. Canuso and Mr. Sobelle finally come together, rolling around and throwing in gratuitous headstands, are thin and mawkish.
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Only near the end, when Anna is found to be mysteriously cured after falling unconscious, does the story veer toward the mawkish.
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Returning to The General Jungle's drawings, it's obvious that the artists savor their park strolls as moments of heavy, almost mawkish contemplation.
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The rest is a mawkish, retrograde misfire that tries hard to recall an earlier era of filmmaking, but misses the point altogether.
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Those moments wouldn't be as out-of-place in the more self-consciously mawkish film that lurks around the corners of this material.
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The sound Rainer Maria produced on their early works is the definition of art house emo—discordant, atonal at times, and cunningly mawkish.
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And, at the risk of mawkish superstition, wasn't the brief moment of showmanship, the hope that this was just another false retirement, perfectly apt?
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The Super Bowl gig annoys many, who have written Coldplay off as dinosaurs of a mawkish, performative sincerity, and some of it is true.
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"Viper Club" falters with mawkish flashbacks of the mother and son, and with its ham-fisted, repeated emphasis on the smarm of government officials.
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Even in reruns, Mr. Joel remains divisive; nearly every year, someone writes a high-blood-pressure jeremiad, denouncing his music as derivative and mawkish.
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It seems at first mawkish, then possibly part of an unfamiliar 19th-century grieving ritual or, for that matter, a sculpture by Kiki Smith.
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As "Pow" quietly jumps from scene to scene, the order seems interchangeable as moments — some singular, others more mawkish — threaten to swallow the greater whole.
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Hacksaw Ridge is heavily fictionalized (though still less so than most based-on-true-events movies) and its plot contrivances and conveniences get mighty mawkish.
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To speculate on the weather conditions of the day he first entered the Brill Building would be mawkish, cliché and melodramatic beyond taste and shame.
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"Seventeen" ends with these hesitant lovebirds on the swings, looking toward a future that by rights will include many a less coy and mawkish play.
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Then, as now, he could swerve quickly from mawkish to mischievous — by turns a goofy extrovert and a lone wolf, withdrawing in moments of introspection.
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When Kid Sampson (Jackson Bews) is sliced in half by an airplane, the orchestration becomes mawkish, layered with the shock of scene's the gory visuals.
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He seemed calmest, though, during the deeply mawkish "Children," largely due to the presence of four young dancers, brought out to flank him as he performed.
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Nabokov could forgive Wilson's mawkish indulgence of the Bolsheviks — but not his hostile and ignorant review of "Eugene Onegin" (Nabokov's famously eccentric translation of Pushkin's epic).
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There's a thin line between the mawkish and the merely sentimental, and Wendy, Benh Zeitlin's riff on the Peter Pan story, rides it with unnerving abandon.
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The mawkish music swelled, cued to LED lights that faded from red to purple to blue; the illumination gave it the appearance of a shower of sparks.
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"Dyslexic Heart" might be a little mawkish in its tone and wordplay, but "Waiting For Somebody" was better than anything off those last couple of Mats albums.
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At the same time, its lyrics, which had always leaned towards being heart-on-sleeve and mawkish, took a more dramatically possessive turn, sometimes with violent imagery.
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It's all slightly campy, but these two, whose relationship could easily have been portrayed in a mawkish or ridiculous way, came across to me as deeply sympathetic.
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Her short narrative series tells the story of a girl who cuts off parts of her body after finding herself infected by a mawkish, brainwashing, Disney-inspired virus.
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This past week's dramatic Pyongyang summit meeting between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un triggers memories of mawkish Pyongyang pageants past.
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The notion that flukes resemble an angel's wingspread is a troublesome allusion in the context of a subject that has borne more than its share of mawkish hyperbole.
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"The Greatest Showman," a musical about the circus impresario P.T. Barnum, was dismissed by many critics when it arrived in theaters just before Christmas. Uncool. Old-fashioned. Mawkish.
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As mawkish as this sounds: The Bluebird is about songs, not stardom — their power to crystallize ephemeral emotions and reach places inside you that don't see them coming.
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We might say that, after the much more brazen themes in films such as The Smiling Madame Beudet, the imagery in Celles qui s'en font is fairly mawkish.
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Nolan's storyline is the most mawkish, and the reason 21 Thunder will forever fall under the category of "teen dramas" even though its characters are well out of teenhood.
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Mr Clegg: It sounds rather mawkish and cheesy, for which apologies, but I take, certainly here in [Britain], massive comfort from a lot of the young folks I meet.
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Frontman and sole original member James Alex's penchant for the mawkish permeates every aspect of the band's persona, from their lyrics to their artwork to their social media presence.
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But not all the actors thrive under this sympathetic and ultimately mawkish approach: Mr. Pang is a neat sketch in hypocrisy, but Ms. Tan's calamitous Michelle just never adds up.
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For a second there, we thought you were safe from ill-informed, mawkish headlines, considering you'd just embarked on a world tour, married Wissam Al Mana, and announced your pregnancy.
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Though studded with moments of marvelous intensity, Maar's retrospective plants one foot in the world of radical, seedy, adventurous photo-artistry, and the other in a world of mawkish, sentimentalism.
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Beyond mawkish sentiment, one more often finds a tension between a utopian wish—home, hearth, and community—and a fraught negotiation of life's challenges to have animated the genre's classics.
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But despite a structural conceit that establishes the action as an exercise in deterministic tragedy, the show, directed by Joe Mantegna and marred by a mawkish underscore, lacks propulsive energy.
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Sadly, this week's "Designated Survivor" proved unable to maintain this delicate act: It has a riveting A Story, but a labored B Story and an unimportant and mawkish C Story.
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"It was really important, without being mawkish or false, that he make amends to her — that he take accountability for the pain that he and only he has caused," Affleck said.
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But even when it did something dumb, it usually followed up that moment with a smarter decision, which kept whole evenings of programming from sliding off a cliff into mawkish, soft-focus platitudes.
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"It's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and 'Peyton Place' adumbrations in which five women are involved with their assorted egotistical aspirations, love affairs and Seconal pills," he wrote.
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That's one of the reasons her debut, Same Trailer, Different Park, was lauded as a work of modest genius—she was fearless, proud, unafraid of heartbreak, pro-fun, anti-cliché, somehow never mawkish.
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That's shorthand for what happens when a writer is stripped of his complexity and turned into a mawkish salesman for all that is meaningful and true in this messed-up-but-fundamentally-good world.
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Where high aspirations left Van Sant doomed to the perception of failure, Franklin and company are likely to succeed, because "Fuller House" is a mawkish, grating, broadly played chip off the "Full House" block.
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Hating ewoks is a meme of its own, though the reason most give for hating them—that they disrupt the original trilogy's supposed seriousness and grit with their mawkish fluffiness—is a bit much.
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As far as museum takeaways go, a unifying and consideration-inducing sentiment can sound a little ethereal and mawkish, but the Museum of Nonhumanity's graceful, understated choreography makes it seem like just what we need.
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Mac DeMarco (Sunday) Under his stereotypically trendy guise of wrinkled oversized shirts, unkempt hair and a haughty gaze, this psych-pop rocker offers indie-pop chorales with moping, ruminative lyrics that seldom veer toward mawkish.
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" Addressing that scene, Affleck told the newspaper, "It was really important, without being mawkish or false, that he make amends to her — that he take accountability for the pain that he and only he caused.
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The company looked more at home in Christopher L. Huggins's "Latched," but that was a gain of equivocal merit since the work is at once mawkish and blunt, tonally matching the electronic melodrama of music by SOHN.
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Though some of what was offered could be considered mawkish schlock, much was vigorous and moving, particularly once the literary playwright Jacob Gordin insisted that actors stay faithful to the text and stop larding it with shtick.
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He pushes and pushes and pushes the feelings till you think that surely they must crack and become mawkish, become a cheesy anthem or a soppy ballad picked out by a man who can't channel what's inside him.
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The rest of the country's brief, mawkish love of New York stretched just far enough to allow it the status of martyr, a symbolic bumper sticker for all we've lost and continue to lose to the rising tides.
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But the rest of the novel — with its reams of psych-speak dialogue ("You have to let it go — you have to open yourself up") and Leavitt's repositioning of William as a victim suddenly worthy of pity — seemed mawkish.
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I love movies, and spent the first three-quarters of my life obsessing about this weird pageant of self-appraisal and mawkish mourning, and even I've struggled in recent years to give the scantest of shits about who wins what.
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The entire show has a panache, a visual effectiveness, which manages to maintain a fine balance between a sense of generalized reverence, the brash visual flourish of a gaudy carnival spectacle, and the slightly mawkish magic of Victorian stained glass.
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This was a pivot for such a lighthearted show; some saw it as a ploy to compete with NBC's mawkish headliner This Is Us. But Levitan insists that the death wasn't just an effort to get some grief in the show.
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I thought Arrival did a tremendous job of building tension around its alien mysteries, but its human connection seemed mawkish and like a frustrating distraction for long enough that I had trouble accepting it even when the connections became clear.
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He survived a brush with scandal over a campaign slush fund filled by wealthy businessmen with a now-legendary televised address, in which he made memorably mawkish mention of his mortgage, his wife's cloth coat, and the family cocker spaniel, Checkers.
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And some might suggest that the whole atmosphere at the Camp Nou on Saturday was too distracting and too inevitably mawkish as the Catalans used the occasion to pay homage to Johan Cruyff, the former club great who died in Barcelona on March 24.
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"La Femme et le TGV" ("The Woman and the TGV," available for a fee from iTunes), from Switzerland, is almost rescued from mawkish triviality by the affecting performance of the great Jane Birkin as the title character, and nearly ruined by a cloying, aggressive score.
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If War occasionally lapses into mawkish, melodramatic moments it doesn't need (or that Reeves' and Mark Bomback's script can't fully support—apparently apes can be as corny as humans), War more than makes up for it with sequences of such eye-candy spectacle you won't cry foul.
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They're usually mawkish, overly sentimental, and calculated to make people already emotional at Christmas get a bit misty eyed at an attempt to sell them stuff, but this year's version is notable for actually being quite nice — even if it does blatantly rip off viral videos.
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They were there to see Uliana Lopatkina, Vladimir Shklyarov and seven less-famous Mariinsky dancers rotate through a jumbled sequence of dances that ranged from a pas de deux from Act II of "Giselle" (1841) to John Neumeier's mawkish and absurdly kitsch "Pavlova and Cecchetti" (1971).
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On the other hand, the former Disney animator Glen Keane's draftsmanship, and a score rather recognizably by John Williams, don't do enough to distinguish "Dear Basketball," a mawkish ode to hoop dreams created and narrated by Kobe Bryant, from the bland uplift of a Nike commercial.
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Yet in the sensitive intimacy of her curly-hair armpits and pubis region, there are traces of the writhing world of Art Nouveau, and little of the influence of Oskar Kokoschka's expressionism that marks many of Schiele's more mawkish paintings in this show of roughly 120 works (mostly drawings).
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Veering between mawkish sentimentality on the one hand and indulgence in video-game war porn on the other, the country could no longer appreciate as it once did the martial virtues, which are not unbridled ferocity but rather discipline, self-abnegation, perseverance and loyalty to a constitutional order rather than to a president.
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The world it's created is so viscerally discomfiting to watch that whenever the show tries to use music to punch up the tension or to undercut it ironically, instead it has the opposite effect: Things start to feel mawkish and silly, and my emotional attachment to what's happening onscreen is broken a little.
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When she writes that Landon's "Flowers of Loveliness" is "not blandly shallow but deeply shallow", or that what might first be read as "mawkishness" is really a "channel" for "suppressed personal rage", or that her "naive sentimentalism" reveals "bitter and cynical depths when voiced", the modern reader returns to the poems, reads them aloud and concludes: shallow, mawkish, sentimental.
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"Life Itself," a romantic drama, was written and directed by Dan Fogelman, the creative force behind the hit NBC drama "This Is Us." Amazon paid $22004 million for rights to the independently produced "Life Itself" and hoped that the film would strike a chord similar to "This Is Us." But critics attacked Mr. Fogelman's movie as a mawkish melodrama.
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When its script deviates from Adams' soft and graceful language in the novel, or from the miniseries' fast-paced action/reaction structure, it can devolve rapidly into mawkish and unsubtle platitudes about friendship and love and community, which mostly just underscore how little friendship and love and community we've seen because Watership Down has been too busy trying to scare us.
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The Act carries with it everything that has become slightly mawkish and unwholesome about true crime in an era when we're inundated with it — particularly the fact that all of the events it chronicles happened to real people, that a real girl was made ill by a real mother, that the mother was stabbed many times in the back, but we're now meant to consume it as entertainment.
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Along the way, Amazon threw in a bizarre and incongruous subplot about drone strikes that vacillated between a searing critique of the video-game consoles at military bases in Nevada, where drone pilots kill terrorism suspects half a world away, and a painfully mawkish redemption arc, in which a drone pilot travels to Syria to donate money and apologize in person to the son of an innocent civilian he bombed.
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