He will pick out dubious phrases from testimony and check them via Google on his BlackBerry.
Our own is of course the Finest Hour of 1940-41, ween "we stood alone", in Churchill's dubious phrase.
Stills from the show are used as shorthand for various feelings – a closeup of Arthur's clenched fist, for example, equals suppressed rage – while the different skin colours of the characters allow meme-makers to layer on jokes about racial politics, such as Arthur's sister DW silencing her white bunny friend as she utters the dubious phrase "all lives matter".
Where Dargis cites André Bazin's praise for "the genius of the system" (a dubious phrase from a critic who wrote in vehement opposition to the claims of the young Cahiers du Cinéma critics the future New Wave that the Hollywood-based directors Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, and Nicholas Ray were major artists), it seems worth mentioning that now there is more or less no system at all.
"There is no more dubious phrase than 'studies have shown.'" he told me.
But when élite and generally liberal publications start broadcasting dubious catch phrases that dovetail nicely with such explanations, I start to worry.
If the stuff was acquired in dubious circumstances a phrase stretched to cover everything from illicit archaeological digs to war-time loot to the idols of heathen gods handed over to missionaries by their converts then it should go back to where it came from, forthwith.
I attempted to research the specifics of the scandal for this article, but it is so unbelievably dull unless you consider a phrase like "dubious home loan" sexy that I was unable to maintain focus.
"Acclaimed" is perhaps wishful thinking, but the most dubious words in that puffy phrase are "documentary film".
(The film itself credits Paul Alexander's biography of Salinger as its source). "Acclaimed" is perhaps wishful thinking, but the most dubious words in that puffy phrase are "documentary film". There are plenty of archival images and talking-head interviews, but "Salinger," directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign.
