Beyond its abundant charms, "Un Lun Dun" never misses an opportunity to undermine the tiresome plot devices and tedious moralizing of traditional fantasy.
See if you can tell which way he is going to go: "Here she comes again, Mother Courage and her bloody cart, condemning audiences to three-and-a-quarter hours of hectoring lectures, unrepentant Marxism, tiresome alienation devices and a bucketful of condensed misery.
What might seem a tiresome novelist's device, Lytton's oft-repeated insistence that Leonard is perfect for Virginia, a woman he has barely met, turns out to be faithful to the historical record.
At one point Nora interrupts Effie's narrative to ask, mockingly, if a detail that she's just revealed is supposed to be magic realism -- a sly wink from Atkinson that suggests she knows how tiresome that crusty old device can be.
This literary device may sound potentially tiresome — some self-conscious preening, a bit of postmodern flummery.
As for the criticism of the character as juvenile and the mnemonic device of "Aflac!" as tiresome, Ms. Kaplan Thaler replied: "You do advertising for the public at large.
There is really no need for any recreations of Rothko paintings in "Red," even though the play is an extended examination of the artist's opening line: "What do you see?" The artworks are all imagined — at several points, one or both characters stare intently at the fourth wall, a device that somehow manages to avoid becoming tiresome.
While the narrative can become tiresome with its periodic translation of language into food, this device is also used as a way of exploring the early estrangement between Linda and her adoptive mother: "Momchocolatemilk, honest.
This narrative device, assisted by appropriate on-screen graphics, soon becomes tiresome, but it's emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain.
For the rest of us, the moment arrives when we come to see that the lifeguard was right: these devices are too large; they are awkward to manage, tiresome.
