Word: banal
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...comedy is McDonagh's signature. He can shock an audience into laughing at just about anything (suicide, patricide, terrorism, famine), and his expletive-ridden dialogue - its cadence and Celtic slang borrowed from his Irish background - can make even the most banal comment sound like a punch line. Audiences first fell for McDonagh's gritty, witty brand of theater in 1996, when his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane - about the love-hate relationship between a spinster and her domineering mother - won the then 26-year-old a handful of awards and the first of many Tony nominations. Since then...
...call attention to this ambiguity of interpretation. Recordings from amateur home movies that Forgács discovered in archives across Europe are pieced together and juxtaposed with clips of Nazi brutality. Many of the scenes chosen are strikingly simple in the actions that they portray. “These banal everyday film recordings have something special to me,” he said. “They always ask a lot of questions: who, why, what, where?...Amateur film, to me, uses the language of ancient film, of Eisenstein, Griffith, of the great American avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s...
...asking voters to understand the context of Wright's anger, though, Obama is counting on voters to accept nuance in an arena that almost always rewards simplicity over complexity. Politicians tend to offer deliberately banal choices: Either we move forward or we fall backward, either we let the economy falter or we help it grow, either we succumb to our enemies or we defeat them - the choice is up to you, America! Obama's formulation was different. Explicitly asking Americans to grapple with racial divisions and then transcend them - that's a bolder, riskier request...
...deliberately devoid of real tension. Either we move forward or fall backward, either we let the economy falter or we help it grow, either we succumb to our enemies or we defeat them - the choice is up to you, America! Obama's either/or formulation is not nearly so banal. Explicitly asking Americans to grapple with racial divisions, and then transcend them - that's a bold request. Will they comply? Obama's presidential hopes depend...
...other celebrities chanting Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech, has popped up all over the internet. From the feigned emotion on these celebrities’ faces, one would think they were reading from the Bible or Shakespeare, not from a relatively well written but somewhat politically banal stump speech. Nonetheless, this nauseating video has now become the new symbol for Obama’s grassroots support...