Word: banal
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...copy first printing. Director Alan Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men) has bought it for the movies. What Donna Tartt has attempted -- and largely brought off -- is a challenging combination of a mystery (will they get caught or won't they?), an exploration of evil, both banal and bizarre, and a generous slice of the world as seen by the author, a brainy graduate of Bennington who has mastered Greek and English literature and doesn't care who knows it. It all adds up to confidence verging on bravura...
...indirect one. Here, as in every democracy, we witness all the aspirations, ambitions, battles and hunger for power. My position seems to be the one of a dreamer who mumbles something about ideals, completely untouched by real life, whereas politics takes a different course. But this is a very banal view. In reality it seems to me that my constant repetition of certain things planted seeds. I do see this right now, in the moment when my federal presidency is over. From various sides I seem to be hearing voices that call for exactly such a person who would...
...hand--the "university" hand--you have the banality of Depeche Mode "People are people, so why should it be; that you and I should get along so awfully?" It's not so banal when it comes from a victim of racial injustice like Rodney King, who held a press conference to jump-start the national healing process. "Can't we all get along?" he asked...
...blame rests not on Ms. S.'s shoddy reporting, carelessness, bad writing, and total ineptitude in reviewing a complex play, but in your actually printing such a banal piece of garbage. Every detail is incorrect and misinformed, right down to the insipid photograph that you ran, miscaptioned "The Climax" when in fact it is a cast photograph bearing little relation to the performance and staged entirely by your staff photographer...
Clurman lets them reveal themselves in their own remarks and behavior: Nicholas as a bottom-line type who lusted for the merger (and the promised job of co-CEO) seemingly at any price; Munro as a backslapping cheerleader with a bent toward the banal and the four-letter word (with a grand retirement package awaiting); McManus as a beleaguered figure striving to salvage a degree of authority over the company's magazines and some esteem from his staffers while Brack belittles them by insisting that "the marketplace," not editors and thinkers, "should dictate what a magazine should...