Hackneyed

Christy Lemire of the AP reviews Shrek 3 and finds it hackneyed:

"Shrek the Third" begins with a death, and from there the movie itself steadily dies. The third installment in this monster of an animated franchise still subverts the fairy tales we grew up knowing and loving, but it's smothered in a suffocating sense of been-there, done-that.

Which is all well and good. I mean, I don't know if I agree with her assessment or not, but I'd agree that any movie with a 3 in the title has to have at least a little feeling of overuse. But then Christy just can't keep from being a little hackneyed herself:

(Why Fiona can't take over in a fairy-tale land where the all the other rules have been upended is never addressed. She is the more even-tempered and levelheaded of the two, after all. Perhaps if Hillary were president ....)

*Sigh*

Is it just me, or have movie reviews become more and more politicized these days? It's as if movie (and theater) critics are secretly ashamed to be writing about "entertainment" and would rather be discussing "important" things like global warming and the Bush administration's misuse of political power.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if an upcoming review of Pirates 3 doesn't compare the East India Trading Companies' effort to stamp out pirating to the War on Terror or wonders how broom riding stacks up on carbon emissions in Harry Potter 5.