Word: banality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chabrol describes himself as "not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live." The background of his films show an avaricious and innately destructive world of monstrous and banal people. It is, for the most part, only background, and the films are more specifically about complex relationships and interaction of characters. But where Lang's or Hawks's characters will confront their directors' vision of society-gone-wrong head on, Chabrol's retreat a little from it to defensive personal eccentricities. Both Chris (Anthony Perkins) and Paul (Maurice Ronet) are warped in Chabrolian high-style: bored...
...annihilates any credibility to her stated relationship with Georges, the chief of police. Genet's contradictions work better set in a world where men are more-or-less men and women women; when the men are made effeminate and the women overly masculine, the text appears too-soon banal, the action singularly purposeless. The actors in the Balcony are always pawing at one another, an inadequate substitute for the guts in Gent's work...
Many foreigners fear that U.S. violence is rapidly becoming almost banal, espoused by Maoists and Minutemen alike, routinely threatened-if not actually practiced-by students, racial militants and antiwar dissenters. Such fears sound odd coming from, say, the impeccably rational Frenchmen who only recently applauded student anarchists in Paris. Even so, the U.S. is undeniably starting to lead all advanced Western countries in what Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal calls "the politics of assassination." No French President has been murdered since 1932; West German leaders go virtually unguarded; the last (and only) assassination of a British Prime Minister occurred...
From the start, Warhol worked to a chorus of cheers and jeers. Campbell soup-can silk screens ladeled him with fame, becoming artistic beacons gazing at life's banal objects with a wan, reportorial eye. Turning to moviemaking, he lifted the underground cinema's popularity to new heights while sinking the contents to sadistic depths. His bent is parody and plotlessness, and he has a whimsical flair. Sleep shows six hours of just that; Empire, eight hours long, stars the Empire State Building. ****-the title spoofs film ratings-originally lasted all day and night...
...Russell doesn't know his life has influenced Madigan's, and the film ends ambiguously with no one either innocent or guilty, no one understanding himself or his effect. The small troubles that pervade the film become more tragic in retrospect: Madigan's domestic squabbles are at first banal, finally significant because Madigan dies before they can be resolved in such manner as usually satisfies audiences; his wife's final lament for her dead husband rings hollow because we have only seen her nagging him and his death locks her in the role forever in our minds. Siegel refuses...