Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...film Vagabond begins with Mona's end (she is found frozen to death in a ditch) and then recounts the last months of her life through a series of recollections by the people she met on her lonesome road, all of whose insights into her character or motives are banal. The director's style is as bleakly austere as her subject's life. Varda's camera is nearly always at an objectifying distance from Mona, her editing as abrupt as the small changes in the journey's rhythm (here a spot of comfort, there a moment of near unconscious cruelty...
There is a poignant story here, but Sheehy cannot tell it. Her banal prose and feeble attempts at social science reduce experience to jargon. Alternating her own trendy problems with accounts of Cambodian genocide seems bizarre, to say the least. An apt subtitle for this book might be The Lotus and the Narcissus...
...Miller had taken over the writing as well, and Daredevil gradually became a phenomenon in the insular comic industry. He rejected the constant parade of outrageous costumed villains with apocalyptic visions and pitted Daredevil against an array of criminals, killers, and thieves whose wrongs were small, banal, realistic...
...heads in deference, we revere his clipped eloquence the only way we can--clipped, in fragments. "History exists only because words are corrupted." Or, "reading is the site where structure is made hysterical." How true, how banal--and how much of the banality lies in the dimensions of his discourse. Moment follows isolated moment, nothing is sustained...
...Life is such a sweet insanity," warbles the banal theme song for NBC's new comedy series Valerie. TV sitcoms have spent more than three decades trying to prove that adage, but never more aggressively than now. Eight sitcoms are debuting this month for midseason tryouts. One reason for the onslaught: NBC's The Cosby Show sets a new ratings record virtually every week, and several other comedies, including Family Ties, Cheers, Who's the Boss and Golden Girls, frequently finish in the Nielsen...