Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...particularly well-conceived episode, Cat also learns to play the hypocritical game. On the first day back at school, the teacher tells the students to write a paper about "how I spent my summer." Cat knows the formula for this kind of banal composition, and he dashes off a list of clichees--swimming, sunning, singing campfire songs...
...floors invoked the image of the machine, like the use of bodies as mechanical parts in Busby Berkeley's choreography or the precisely drilled production-line kicks of the Rockettes. Its soaring shafts, tapering setbacks and elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells and slots of shadow suggested exuberance and secrecy conjoined, the "metropolitan style" of Big Business. Instead of quoting Gothic or Renaissance detail as an indirect sign of quality, the whole tower changed into...
...Lloyd Webber's shows. There is no song to compare with Memory in Cats. Instead there are sequences that verge on opera, the most ambitious being a quasi-Mozartian septet. Unfortunately, the wit and scholarship of his tunes are nowhere echoed in Hart's lyrics, which oscillate between the banal and the impenetrable...
...nerd Virgil to the moviegoer's Dante in this travelogue of the surreal landscape called Virgil, Texas. It also represents the first big-screen flowering of the decade's dominant hip sensibility. Like Letterman with his "Small-Town News" and "Stupid Pet Tricks," Byrne is fascinated by the seemingly banal. Like Lynch's Blue Velvet, True Stories rides the subterranean currents of bizarre behavior that bubble under Smalltown, U.S.A. "It's a strange world, isn't it?" the characters in Blue Velvet keep saying. Yes, Byrne would reply, strange and wondrous...
...work, these tend to be muted by irony or else lose their focus in conventional panoramas. But his photocollage method seems perfect for them, and the biggest work in this show, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, sets them forth at full stretch. It is a scene both banal and grand: an intersection on the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, the yellow highway line plunging out to meet the horizon under a great arch of pale blue sky, dry low brush and gray clay dust on either side, the foreground a clutter of desultory trash, beer cans...