Word: banal
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Once upon a time, a drab tapestry hung in the Leverett dining hall. Then the University Art Museum snatched the tapestry away for preservation. For a year, Leverett survived without art. (What would Barbra say?) Everyone wanted something different from the banal, old portraits that Dowling describes as "the Harvard dour faces-white males looking very serious." Finally, the House Masters scraped together enough private money to commission a picture from a young abstract artist, Gerry Webster...
...quality of the prelude, almost like a traditional Japanese drama, is alternately interesting and trite. Using brief statements, each of the women introduces herself to the audience. But the traits of the characters which be prelude conveys would be obvious in any case. And the inclusion of some really banal lines does not help. [Of tea] "We Japanese women drink a lot of it... Become it... Swallow the tempest... And nobody knows... The storm inside." One can only express these sentiments so many times after Oliver Stone's movie. "The Joy Luck Club," before they start sounding simply silly...
Like a priest converting blood into wine, the true artist transmutes the banal pain of ordinary experience into a divine language. Tennessee Williams' rare gift is his ability to imbue the often cruel and grotesque texture of Southern life with a redeeming beauty...
...still failing without access to the reasons has become a salient point to legions of more or less listless young people. Antonioni offers no answers, and his attempts at tenderness are few and far between, but "L'Avventura" frames a vocabulary of a kind of despair, both poignant and banal, that can speak for a part of today's unnamed generation...
...Fish. Some people have hailed this film as a serious, creative cinematic treatment of an important subject that deserves serious artistic consideration. I regard it as a inane, banal cinematic treatment of an important subject that deserves serious artistic consideration...