Word: banality
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...enough accurate material to go on. The characters are like the puppets Thackeray describes in the prologue of Vanity Fair--neither rounded human figures nor Dickensian caricatures. Kubrick rarely creates human characters--Dr. Strangelove was a gallery of types, Lolita a collection of perverts, 2001 veered from the banal to the superhuman, and A Clockwork Orange was about the warping of humanity...
...forgo her credit to enhance the shows' realism. It was Phillips who anchored the soap to the family and peopled it with professionals. The youngest of an Iowa grocer's ten children, she used her grasp of the powerful mythologies that fill family life to enliven even the most banal script. Four of her shows?Days of Our Lives, As the World Turns, Another World, and The Guiding Light?are still running, though she died...
...lost during the '60s. Carla's dream is to become the next Marilyn. Instead, she ends up an embittered go-go dancer. Knight plays Carla with the depth of understanding of one who might have had that dream herself. She goes beyond Carla's sometimes banal lines to give a poignant picture of a woman whose one distinction has led to defeat. Her performance poses a good question not much heard either now or in the '60s: What is wrong with being beautiful...
This is a considerable triumph, for the script gives them precious little to work with. The plot line is but minimally suspenseful and the dialogue generally banal. Director Millar has a nice feel for his handsome Oregon locations but none at all for staging action. His tendency is to back away from it and to minimize it so that even a climactic ride down a white-water river on a raft load ed with nitroglycerin turns out to be dull...
...what is mediocre for Rosen is still something of a marvel amid the scholarly turgidity and banal superlatives of most music critics. His prose is clear and elegant and his thoughts sharply focused. And through his intellectual gymnastics, he is able to convince his readers that, far from the cerebral monster of popular mythology, Arnold Schoenberg was a composer of uncompromising integrity who responded sincerely and successfully to the musical demands of his time. Perhaps Charles Rosen will bring him a small step closer to the general appreciation he merits...