Word: banal
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...stopped smoking for a few days just to see if I could, a profound depression would come over me. The drab grayness of the world would become crushing and the boredom would seem ineluctable. Nothing seemed fun. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Every book was tortuously slow. Every song was criminally banal. Every movie crawled. The sparkle and shine had been sucked out of life so completely that my world came across as some fluorescent-lit, decolorized, saltpetered version of the planet I had known before. And my own prospects? Absolutely dismal. I would sit in that one-bedroom Nishi Azabu apartment...
...room full of not nurse practitioners, not inattentive receptionists, but--gasp--doctors. (Yes, there are doctors at UHS.) Once they've settled in, your parents can learn about UHS's "innovative approaches" to healthcare--presumably these are the approaches they have been hiding from students while using more banal techniques, such as making students wait so long that they get better in the lobby...
...Thus when the trial ends on Feb. 13, Roland Dumas will not be judged for an affaire d??tat but for far more banal matters of the heart and the pocketbook. Whether or not he is found guilty, his career is finished?he was forced to resign from the Conseil Constitutionnel in 1999?and his reputation lies in ruins. For all his efforts to present himself as a political martyr, persecuted by enemies jealous of his ?brilliance,? Dumas could well face the heartbreak of dishonor in his final years...
...writes up a newspaper ad seeking employment, trudges miles to town in the rain to deliver it, then treks back a week later to pick up the one and only reply. It's a quietly stirring proto-feminist sequence, but here it is transmuted into the banal musical yearnings of a romantic teenage girl: "Over mountains, over oceans/Heaven take me away/For I long for my liberty/For sweet liberty I pray...
...it’s galling to resort to heaping such faint praise upon the film when it makes so resolute an effort to stay superficial on every level. It spells out themes and motivations with exasperatingly banal clarity, with the odd obliquely stated plot point tossed in for variety. Time after time, the filmmakers mistake blunt musings for character depth and obvious platitudes for sage utterances. Most insultingly, the film has an annoyingly high “tired scenario” quotient, squeezing in a Big Game, multiple teacher-student confrontations, and a half-serious flirtation between Jamal...