As many of his contemporaries -- most notably Quentin Tarantino -- have spawned legions of imitators and flirted with mannered self-imitation, Mr. Soderbergh has remained stubbornly idiosyncratic and has resisted the temptation to repeat himself.
He knew that Dietrich was ruining herself by endless self-imitation in a nonstop cabaret act, that Callas could produce ugly sounds and was a fool to be besotted with a vulgar billionaire like Onassis.
Nor does it seem possible to dispute that in his case the less contains the greater not for the commoner reason that a great deal of his verse is careless, trivial, or inharmonious, but because his authentic utterance is restricted to a narrow range and his fertility too often takes the form of self-imitation.
It's the sort of self-conscious imitation of dance that people reluctantly perform at wedding receptions before they get drunk enough to really hammer out some moves.
But his "heir to Blair" approach — a self-conscious imitation of the centrist political style of Tony Blair, the Labour prime minister for 10 years until 2007 — did not always sit easily with the Conservative heartland.
And his essay on Mozart's "Così" is subtly revealing: here is an opera in which the characters seemingly have no past, and live in a closed world in which even the music turns on itself in self-referential imitation — a universe of moral bleakness and exquisite beauty.
(Dargis) 'LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN' (R, 110 minutes) This star-studded jigsaw puzzle of revenge and mistaken identity thinks that it's terribly smart, although it amounts to an empty, self-satisfied imitation of "Pulp Fiction" that reputable actors like Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley can't salvage.
(Catsoulis) 'LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN' (R, 110 minutes) This star-studded jigsaw puzzle of revenge and mistaken identity thinks that it's terribly smart, although it amounts to an empty, self-satisfied imitation of "Pulp Fiction" that reputable actors like Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley can't salvage.
Imitation meat, imitation seafood, processed lunch meats, and "self-basting" poultry.
The poor theatre became a worldwide fashion during the late 1960s and early 1970s, even though critics complained that most groups that attempted it produced only self-indulgent imitations that tended to exclude the audience.
Charm: the Raeburn is looking to attract the luxury traveller Location Location Key to the Raeburn's appeal is its location in Stockbridge, a genuinely stylish, charming neighbourhood that occasionally shades into chi-chi pretension or self-conscious imitations of cool – Edinburgh's answer to Notting Hill.
