Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Television now and then manages that sort of effect, metaphysical and banal at the same time. It can make demigods of the weightless, and bring the hallucination of their fighting into the bright box in the corner of the room. / Warriors come luminously out of the night air and perform pageants in the brain...
...reflexive impulse to preserve everything, even the relatively new and banal, occasionally shows signs of getting out of hand. "People are just beginning to talk about ' '50s classics' now, which is a term that embraces some really appalling ticky-tack," says the British-born architectural historian Reyner Banham, who lives in California. "There is a tendency to overlook the aesthetic quality of a building and just keep it because it is old," says Robert Winter, a cultural historian at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "Too often the reason for declaring something ((a historic landmark)) is sentimental." Sentiment is inadmissible...
Prascak has also kept much of Ibsen's poetic language intact. However, he inexplicably destroys the poetic effect by injecting banal modernisms into Ibsen's imagery. Prascak peppers the play with pronouncement's like Peerless' "I feel as strong as a Chicago Bear." Is Prascak making fun of Ibsen's lofty verse, or blindly sacrificing poetry for a cheap laugh? I don't know; it's hard to tell...
Marius' analysis is interesting even though he often lapses into banal generalities of the kind he criticizes in students' writing. He says at one point (and we apologize to Marius for using a lengthy quotation, a technique to which the report objects): "Our students have an almost eerie ability to identify rock groups on hearing a few bars of the music. They know much about sports. They can make exquisite discriminations about the relative merits of various commercials on TV." We appreciate his tact; after all, Marius might simply have called us stupid...
...movie ostensibly tries to subvert. There's a scene where Saskia Post, as Hutchence's girlfriend Anna, drives around in a jealous snit because her boyfriend has kissed someone else. It's a scene that would fit better in a John Hughes teen flick. Dogs is at its most banal during the infuriatingly run-of-the-mill sex scenes between Hutchence and Post. Blue Lagoon had more spice in its sex life...