Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...downtown Burbank to dredge up old films. Although Dino DeLaurentis reigns as the King Kong of this burgeoning market, almost everybody has tried his hand at it. The products range from ridiculous but harmless--Heaven Can Wait--to dramatic yet stupid--Invasion of the Body Snatchers--to just plain banal--The Blue Lagoon...
There all resemblance ends. The music, which is the heart of both phenomena, serves Cowboy mainly as a banal background, not as the dramatic center -the justification really-for the characters' lives. Director James Bridges, whose last film was the smooth, tight thriller The China Syndrome, does not bring to his realization of the C. and W. scene anything like the dynamic energy, the sheer stylistic force with which John Badham drove Fever. Finally, the electric charge that Travolta jolted into that film is missing here. If he keeps on this way, he will turn...
Failing as an artist, Hitler went into politics. Politics, "the art of the possible," Syberberg says. And there he directed his banal drama...
...condescending challenge, 'Are you good enough to keep up with us?' In one such scene, an actor sets a picnic table in front of a slide projection of trees and ferns, eats lunch and prattles about his relationship to Hitler as Obersalzburg servant. It's quite dull. Even... yes, banal. "Why are you fidgeting in your seats?" he turns quickly and asks the audience, smiling. "Bored?" He continues, undaunted by the repressed jeers. Syberberg knows he's boring the masses and, with contempt, he continues. Adolph Hitler, he points out, did everything but bore the masses...
...haircut and moustache, his trademarks. Anyone can wear that face--like kindergarten games, drawing the hair over the forehead and the tufted whiskers above the lip on pictures of people in magazines; yes, anyone can look like Adolph Hitler--he is the common man playing out his most banal fantasies. And, the film implies, anyone with the will can be Adolph Hitler. Hitler is climactically embodied by an actor in lengthy monologue, dressed in the togas of Nero, rising up from Wagner's grave, his faced piqued in totalitarian scowl...