Word: banality
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...entertaining, exploration of the psychic world, yet an other trip through country similar to that traversed in The Exorcist and The Omen. But there is a pointed glee in De Palma's satirical vision of high school society, an oddly compelling power in his juxtaposition of the banal and the awesome moving unsuspected amidst it. The moral reckoning to which that all leads may be curious, but it is surely cautionary. In any event, the journey to that reckoning is an exercise in high style that even the most unredeemably rational among moviegoers should find enormously enjoyable...
...reporters tire of campaign's sameness, and seek the unusual. They pounce on blunders, magnify the trivial and sometimes distort as much as they clarify. For this they may be understood but not wholly forgiven. This election year has witnessed press criticism of a campaign alternatively termed petty, banal and issueless; the irony is that the objects of criticism were often of the media's own creation...
...text of The Serpent is often banal enough to make one cringe. A couple of lengthy exchanges of verbal non sequiturs, supposed articulations of existential anguish, are peppered with McKuenesque dilemmas. Someone tells of passing a friend on the street without trading any greeting--each of them feared the other had looked through instead of at him. Someone else describes a dinner party where she wanted to "scratch out the women's eyes" and "grab the men's balls"--a lame evocation of hostility made even more hokey by the gratuitous vulgarity. While couples copulate with increasing fervor and come...
This is not to imply that Rainer is a sell-out. The works documented in this book have an unmistakable Rainer style even on the page: range of association and depth of sub-text; a touch of the banal; irony sometimes ridiculous, often disorienting. That Rainer in Work 1961-73 could recreate this style through her writing--there are no words...
...Inge of, say, Picnic may be the level at which Jones hits at present. Like Inge, he has a paradoxically lyrical feeling for ordinariness-for hopes and disappointments on the banal scale of "a small frame house in a small framed town...