The stupidest critical cliché ever?

I had some fun last week with a pair of posts about critical clichés, which you can find here and here. Last night, though, I found one that I think beats them all. It was reproduced on the DVD box for a movie at my local video store, and it tells us that the movie "Has to be seen to be fully fathomed."

Think about that for a moment. Don't movies generally have to be seen to fathomed, fully or otherwise?

And now, readers, your question: What is the stupidest critical cliché ever?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Detectives Beyond Borders' most nerve-chilling critical-cliché post yet

I'd planned to return to my normal high seriousness for this comment, but thanks to you, I had so much fun with yesterday's post about critical clichés that I'm offering a sequel.

1) When did it become a high compliment to call a work authentic, and can critics and reviewers vouch for the authenticity of the works they so praise? If I recall correctly, David Mamet once wrote a play about bargemen on the Great Lakes, and a review lauded him for capturing the cadences of Great Lakes bargemen's speech. How in God's name did the reviewer know Mamet had done this?

2) "If Author X wrote in Genre Y, this is the book he would write." Author X in this formula is often Borges, García Márquez or Kafka. (See "transcends its genre.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Critical clichés — A richly textured, fully realized comment

I recently read a reference to a crime novel as "fully realized." Not long before, I'd found myself thinking that another crime novel was "richly textured." You've read both terms a million times; so have I.

Such familiarity is usually a sign of danger. But I've apparently become more tolerant than I was, and I adopted an attitude of benevolent inquiry toward the expression that had sprung so readily to my lips. What did I mean by it? How did it apply to the story in question? I came up with a satisfactory answer, which you may read here one day.

But what about you? What critics' terms have you read and heard so often that they've become part of how you think about books (or other works of art)? What terms drive you nuts? What terms do both? What do critics mean when they use these terms? And what do the terms mean to you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008