Cliches

Alex Waters, a black man in his early 30s, has counted the nights: 1,857 of them, locked in a concrete cell for a crime - rape - that he insists he didn't commit. In The Visit, Hill Harper imbues the role with a simmering intensity and intelligence that transcends this well-crafted drama's weaker, sentimental moments. A small, powerful film - written and directed by Jordan Walker-Pearlman, based on a play by Kosmond Russell - The Visit is a spare and moving study of regret and redemption, marked with chilling truths about a life behind bars.

Nowhere does the saying "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" more readily apply than to the cliche. For centuries, people have been using and abusing cliches, with nary a trace of boredom or fatigue - familiarity does not always breed contempt - and with nary a footnote given to their originators. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten who these literary forefathers (and mothers) were. So, at the risk of sounding cliched, here is a compendium of the origins of some of our most noble platitudes: ACID TEST.

Playwrights who venture behind the walls to attempt a prison drama face an inescapable reality. From the songbook of Johnny Cash to the hard-time inmates of The Shawshank Redemption and Oz, the genre is so entrenched in popular culture that every theme and possible variation has been around the exercise yard many times. In the Philadelphia premiere of Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, Stephen Adly Guirgis has written a play that crests to moments of visceral power by proceeding along his own track.

At least the Disney Channel's new prime-time cartoon, American Dragon: Jake Long, offers a unique take on New York. In the show, which debuts at 8 tonight, it's a city where unicorns frolic in Central Park, leprechauns are the real force on Wall Street, and centaurs commute atop subway cars. But despite that mythical menagerie, there's nothing magical about American Dragon, a train crash of cliches staler than a Henny Youngman one-liner. Jake is a brash 13-year-old Chinese American boy who seems to have learned to talk by watching reruns of Pauly Shore.

The Girl from Monaco isn't the only recent French flick to deal with murder, messy family histories and a sexy TV weathercaster. Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut In Two beat Anne Fontaine's Girl from Monaco to the punch by a good many months. Chabrol's thriller also beats Fontaine's in terms of making any kind of emotional sense. At best diverting, at worst an almost self-parodic compendium of French film cliches, The Girl from Monaco stars Fabrice Luchini as a legendarily successful defense attorney.

The biopic "Selena" opens with the singer belting out a version of "I Will Survive," a choice thick with irony, since the Tejano star will have been dead exactly two years on March 31. The song reflects the aim of the movie, which is to immortalize its subject, murdered Grammy-winner Selena Quintanilla Perez, whose life and career get the gee-whiz gloss of a routine Hollywood biography. The story begins with a quick flashback to Selena's childhood in a middle-class suburb of Houston.

The text of this document is unavailable. Please refer to the microfilm for Friday, December 23, 1994.

"Posse" is a Western of innovations. For one thing, the good guys wear black. For another, they are black. Using the hook of a mostly African-American cast, "Posse" star/ director Mario Van Peebles joins Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood in leading Hollywood's new Western revival. Van Peebles stars as Jessie Lee, leader of a gang of Spanish-American War deserters fleeing across the West with a cache of stolen Spanish gold. In pursuit is a sadistic Army colonel (Billy Zane)

When a coach says that his players gave 110 percent - especially following a loss - it is generally understood to mean, "I have nothing to say about this game. " The phrase stands as one of the most empty and most overused cliches in sports - and sports cliches rank second, in sheer volume, only to the number of molecules in the known universe. When West Chester Christian girls' basketball coach Jenine Faith tells you that her players give 110 percent, she is speaking as literally as one can. With only five athletes on the varsity squad, West Chester Christian is a team without guile.

Reprinted from Thursday's editions. Safe Haven , the latest film adaptation from romance writer Nicholas Sparks ( Dear John , Message in a Bottle ), opens on a dark, stormy night in Boston. A young woman bursts out of a house, running. She fights her way through the heavy rain, running, always running, as police cars, lights and sirens wailing, follow. The runner is Katie, an elegant, slim, troubled, haunted woman whose distress, fear, and anxiety are palpable.

Matt and Vicky Martelli found what became their 5,600-square-foot dream house in West Philadelphia - with enough space to accommodate a "man cave" for him and a room-sized closet for her - because they ignored that old cliché about real estate. You know, the one about location. In essence, they gave up trying to find a house in Center City, their first choice of geography, and decided that the design of the house they wanted was more important than its address. "We tried to buy a house in our old neighborhood in Washington Square West, but we found it would have been impossible, considering the size and number of rooms we wanted," Vicky Martelli says.

THERE'S a particular genre of film and photography that has become associated with Detroit in recent years: Called "rubble porn" or "ruin porn," it dwells on aestheticized images of urban decay and hopelessness that have become glib visual signifiers, not just of Detroit but of post-industrial America. "Detropia" trafficks in its share of those images, most strikingly the ghostly and tattered facade of a once-splendid skyscraper, teetering precariously on a blighted skyline. But in the hands of filmmakers Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, "Detropia" largely sidesteps the cliches and facile false choices that have beset so many Detroit movies.

On Aug. 8, 1971, superstar quarterback Joe Namath threw a pass that was intercepted in a meaningless preseason game. Namath reacted by trying to tackle the opposing player. He promptly blew out his knee, and his team's season was ruined. Asked why, given the game's low stakes, he didn't simply refrain from hurling his body in front of the runaway linebacker, Namath responded: "I only know how to play football one way - at full speed. " Interestingly, Namath wasn't widely pilloried for exhibiting poor judgment; instead, he was admired for being a great competitor and leader.

BETHLEHEM — The dark clouds arrived quickly, minutes after the end of practice. The television satellite trucks packed up and the players showered and dressed and made their way back to their dorm. Soon, thunder and lightning and rain overtook the valley. Sometimes it really does seem like life is just a series of cinematic cliches. The search for the appropriate words here is destined to be futile. On the day a man loses his son, there really are no words. He is a public man, Andy Reid is, and has been since 1999 in Philadelphia, but most still see him as a caricature: big, stubborn, impenetrable.

Azuka Theatre's production of Hope Street and Other Lonely Places by Genne Murphy is exactly the kind of show I want to like. A small theater company, a new script by a local playwright, and under the direction of Kevin Glaccum, who runs the company. I arrived with my cheerleader pom-poms at the ready. And then the play began. About halfway through Act 1, I whispered to my friend in the next seat, "Did it start yet?" Hope Street , set in Philadelphia, is built on so many cliches, so much inaction, with so pointlessly inconclusive a plot, and performed in a style of acting so naturalistic that it seems to be anti-acting, that the answer to my question was both yes, obviously, and no, not really.

IN RON SHELTON'S "Bull Durham," one of the best sports movies ever made, Crash Davis coaches his mentee, Nuke LaLoosh, on how to talk to the press. "You're gonna have to learn your cliches," Crash says. When LaLoosh counters that this tactic is boring, Crash replies, " 'Course it's boring, that's the point. " The same could be said for sports movies in general. They all seem to follow the same general pattern: A team must overcome seemingly insurmountable odds in order to win out in the end, even if their triumph isn't literal.

* AMERICAN HORROR STORY. 10 tonight, FX. * GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD. 9 tonight and tomorrow, HBO.   IN A COUNTRY full of people stuck in houses they can't afford and can't sell, you don't have to look far to find a horror story. The American Dream-turned-nightmare isn't nearly scary enough for "Glee" producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, whose latest production, FX's "American Horror Story," mines its blood-spattered genre for one cliche after another to tell the story of a couple whose lack of due diligence - starting with a failure to Google their prospective new address - results in the worst case of buyer's remorse since the Lutz family moved into that house in Amityville.

By Kevin Horrigan To help guide us through negotiations over the federal budget deficit, the committee has invited Mr. Arbuthnot - the world's foremost cliché expert and a creation of the late Frank Sullivan, of the New Yorker - to testify. Mr. Chairman: Can you describe the federal deficit for us, Mr. Arbuthnot? Mr. Arbuthnot: Unsustainable. Q: Anything else? A: Crushing. Massive. Unprecedented. Backbreaking. Structural. Q: What are we doing by running deficits this high?

The Life of Edith Piaf By Carolyn Burke Alfred A. Knopf. 284 pp. $27.95 Reviewed by Steven Rea 'Just look at her. How can such a big voice belong to such a tiny woman?"