Word: banality
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...ever-accelerating apocalypse conventional religion seems irrelevant, it's simply not of interest (who needs it?), we've heard it all before, etc. Overcoming these formidable cultural barriers, Eric Rohmer has created a work of incredibly exciting proportions about a devout Catholic learning how to live in the banal bourgeois continuum of provincial France...
...this point, The Edible Woman assumes the force of a banal dream that has turned, without the dreamer's quite noticing, into a nightmare. The metaphor of cannibalism takes over until all the characters appear as predators. The only hope allowed Marian at the end: if she becomes a consumer again herself, life may appear "normal" to her once more...
...Enough. Hitler's designs are like his speeches: huge, hammeringly repetitious, banal, but filled with an inescapable, machine-like force. He had no perceptible sense of proportion, interval, space or even ornament. But he did know that very big buildings tend to make very big impressions on people. And that was enough...
...worst thing about the film was Hal Holbrook. As Maxie's high school principal he speaks for the director, and he speaks a series of banal platitudes that only the Needham P. T. A. could find palatable. Lines like "Some of these kids just want to turn the world upside down, others just want to retreat from it." He looks so sincere and self-righteous, as if he were God himself speaking from the rostrum of the high school auditorium. Later, when he finds out his son is dealing, he pats him on the cheek, and then climbs down...
...heard. "The cruelest persecution." he learns, "is the persecution of silence," the repressive tolerance accorded him by the State, which renders all his actions not only ineffective but unreal. The Revolutionary asks much the same question as Zabriskie Point about the nature-or possibility-of real experience in a banal, totally artificial society...