Word: banality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jour and, to a lesser extent, The April Fools. But it lacks the surrealistic pathology of Belle and the slick American romance of Fools. Its milieu, instead, is the typical Sagan domain of croquet on Parisian lawns and seaside Scrabble on the Cote d'Azur, of cliquishness and banal cleverness ("I'm wearing black because it's so gay"), of highly polished and muted passions...
...Paris as a city of escape and freedom will find no support in this film.) We first see a wife arguing with her husband, both of them trapped within a tiny but status situated apartment. After running out she is accosted by a man who, using the same banal fantasy she had earlier expressed to her husband, tries to induce her to run away with him. This dialogue takes place on a bridge overlooking the yard of the famous train station, and the bars of the bridge reinforce her own knowledge that the freedom she might feel would soon dissipate...
...Doubleday books, Crossroads of World History. It is evident, too, in his debunking of some of the more cherished legends of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, Prescott is not quite so fastidious about his prose. His style is as crotchety as it sometimes was in his critical days, and often banal to boot...
...book's unevenness is less important. Perhaps the reader learns to use the book, to play with the order and ideas; or with the year in mind the quality and sense of each poem comes to mean the quality and sense of a moment, a day--some flat, banal, moody, hopeful, senseless, surreal, clear, brilliant. And Lowell has the license of the great poet to use dead moments in his designs. The images in Notebook circulate around the poet and his time--describing a curious age in sadness, in chaos, in revolution, and--if weary and bitter-in health, "unconquerable...
...admire: a planned hibernation of the spirit in which one evades any commitment to love, hate or passion. Instead of eloquence, the play offers truncated, disjointed sentences. Inertia usurps the role of action; the prevailing mood is torpor. All that Williams seems able to contribute is a little banal philosophizing about how the creation of art saps a man's life. Still, there is an axiom of the race track that a thoroughbred will eventually revert to form. One must never forget that, despite his present esthetic humiliation, Tennessee Williams is a thoroughbred...