Word: banality
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...Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically thirsty, seems to have made little musical progress since that Curtis Lemay extravaganza. His To St. Cecilia was an exciting grotesque written in his consummately banal idiom featuring vapid stentorian outbursts for a brass ensemble and Victory at Sea-type arching melodies for the hapless chorus. This clangorous work, sounding like Hollywood with the rough edges knocked of, brilliantly captured a certain Pliestoceme ambience which would have been beyond the grasp of a lesser composer...
...habitual gallerygoer opts for the caricatures, one explanation is that serious artists in this century have ever more moved toward abstraction and developed an audience that now finds realism intrinsically banal. But, as Levine knows, there is another, even larger audience consisting of "people who don't live solely in the art world, people who are related to the kind of people I paint." He is delighted when one of those exclaims, "That picture of a presser looks exactly like my uncle," or "That woman on the beach reminds me of my aunt...
...darkroom assistant in Dancker's photo shop in Bonn could hardly believe his eyes. Among banal vacation snapshots on a strip of film taken from a Minox camera were nine pictures of NATO documents clearly marked "Top Secret" and "Secret." It took police and the West German Counter Espionage Service four days to identify the owner of the film. He proved to be Rear Admiral Hermann Ludke, formerly deputy chief (early 1966 to mid-1967) of the logistics section of SHAPE, NATO's European command, who was on the eve of his retirement from the service...
...this Romeo and Juliet had been produced in 1956, there might have been no need for West Side Story the following year. "I wanted to bring the story to the attention of young people," says Director Franco Zeffirelli. "The story is of two urchins crushed by a stupid, banal quarrel with origins even the adults don't know. In love the young couple found an ideal - one they could die for - and youth today is hungry for ideals...
Director Christian de Chalonge tells Antonio's story in straightforward documentary style, avoiding dramatic climaxes and resisting all the opportunities for easy sentimentality. The casting is superbly unactorish. Churlish hotel clerks, irritated factory officials and the nurse's sleek young friends making banal conversation about the beauties of Portugal-all look their roles and read their lines without a hint of theatrical emphasis or timing. The Portuguese peasants are clearly not actors at all. but no professional performer could hope to match the direct simplicity of their response to the tragedy that surrounds them. Best...