conceit

The worthy effort to emphasize that much of the artist’s inventive genius — unfurling in thousands of manuscript pages, rather than oil paint and tempera — makes the dull staging a perhaps unavoidable conceit.

It breaks the movie out of the conceit of it actually being a live show, and suddenly you shatter the fourth wall.

As a writer, he showed a distinct wit and emotional insight, and he grew into one of the band’s most prolific pens — the collaged pop-lyric conceit of “Better Than Words” was his idea.

Zemeckis maintains the frames-within-frames conceit as a transitional flourish in the film version of “Here,” but the plot itself is more about jumping around in time while maintaining the stationary camera.

The Lego conceit proves an ideal format for visually embodying these tunes, as bouncing abstract creations spring and jiggle to musical life.