It may sound hackneyed to say that Kippenberger's life was an extended alcohol-fueled performance piece, but in a sense it was — at once self-indulgent, self-destructive and, oddly, selfless, almost self-sacrificing.
"It was something, frankly, rather hackneyed," Latimer said.
Others called King out for the transgender storyline, saying it was "hackneyed" and "harmful".
The book follows a sleek curve, which doesn't steer very far from the standard voyage and return plotline, but that's not to say it's hackneyed.
Now it sounds hackneyed, almost, to say, well, look what's happened.
When the play opened, the Times panned it as a "hackneyed melodrama," and said that Penn's character "mopes around the house like a sick gerbil".
"Everybody thinks it's hackneyed," Mr. Harrigan said recently over lunch at the Menger Hotel, a block from the Alamo.
Jerry Stahl, whose harrowing heroin memoir of 1995, "Permanent Midnight," was turned into a hackneyed 1998 film, says: "If a movie seems to be telling you, between every line, how great it is -- if you just know, as you suffer through it, that the writers, or the actors, or the directors, really thought they were doing something great -- that's generally the tipoff for me".
"I would welcome the spotlight moving away from what I think is an increasingly tired, hackneyed, desiccated, super-masticated issue," he said.
