But Birdman is actually about something other than its ostensible subject: the miraculous ability of today's digital movie cameras to go wherever film-makers choose – up, down, sideways, on the ground, in the air – and for as long as they choose.
He took seriously the obligations of ostensible noblesse and used his abilities, his power, his position, and his wealth to serve some serious version of the public good, on a world-historical scale.
The U.A.V. has some of the same ostensible attraction, seemingly offering the ability to carry out "surgical" strikes at little or no risk to one's own soldiers, hence encouraging politicians to pursue continuous warfare.
Often the degree to which art calls attention to itself as art is inversely related to its ability to illuminate the ostensible topic.
But amid the spinning disco balls, glowing heat lamps, slow-motion videos of writhing dancers and spewing volcanoes, and the neon-red rods of light hung like vines above the stage for no ostensible reason, his endearing faith in the acting abilities of opera singers left them mugging helplessly and otherwise standing around, as if clueless about what to do.
Great stuff, right?' While Franzen has, since the 2001 publication of The Corrections, been hailed for his extraordinary sentences and ability to capture the American zeitgeist, as well as reviled for ostensible arrogance and sexism (more on those in a bit), his fiction had never struck me as overtly self-referential.
The ostensible reason for keeping the story under wraps -- that it might damage the ability of the government to prevent an attack -- is nonsense.
22 The ostensible purpose of IOPTH monitoring in localized PHPT is to unmask unrecognized MGD; however, the ability of the test to successfully serve this function is not certain.
Whatever the real reason, the ostensible one was based on the shenanigans of these hostile takeovers, premised in the board's ability to judge whether a bid was underpriced.
