Word: banality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...justify Frank's claim that they possess "the most astoundingly lambent light this side of a Caspar David Friedrich sunset." That must be the most astoundingly nutty thing written by a talented critic about a talented artist so far this winter. But they do have a weird, banal intensity, especially in Viewing the Sculpture, 1980, where a number of chairs in a tract-home parlor survey a pressed-steel hardware-store Lazy Susan, landed in their midst like an alien life form...
...Love American Style" provided quick, imaginative, sometimes impossible situations; Sunday Lovers provides tedious, over-used plots. Where "Love American Style" used unusual idiosyncratic characters, Sunday Lovers employs expectable, almost banal personalities. Where "Love American Style" let us laugh at ourselves through its perceptive vision of the contemporary preoccupation with sex for its own sake, Sunday Lovers falls flat...
Anyone who spent much time at the television set, as millions did, during a fortnight of American rites-the Inaugural, the flight home of the hostages, the Super Bowl with its quasi minute of silent prayer-saw some memorable moments. But the proportion of the memorable to the banal, the overhyped, the stage waits, the garrulous monologues when nothing was happening, was about...
...album, a psalm to menages a trois. But not to worry, the Dan says, "The kid will live and learn, as he watches his bridges burn from the point of no return." Wow--three cliches strung together in an entirely new fashion! Music has never been so coolly banal...
...more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication...