Word: banality
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...Emerald Forest" earned director John Boorman stripes as an adventurer with an eye for pictorial rapture and social turmoil. But in "Beyond Rangoon," an improbable tale of an American damsel-doctor caught amidst the genocidal Burmese civil war, Boorman "lapses into banal visual stereotyping," saysTIME's Richard Corliss. "The rebels are thin, winsome, saintly, while the nasty soldiers have bad skin and potbellies. And the film simply forfeits belief with its notion that Laura (played by Patricia Arquette), who stumbles through Burma like a girl in a monster movie after she's seen the giant ants, is a physician...
This time, however, the records were not so banal. They showed that Foster was worried about how to treat on their tax returns the $1,000 the Clintons received for selling their stake in Whitewater that year. The reason: though the Clintons had claimed during the campaign that they lost $68,000 on Whitewater, their accountants could document only $5,800 worth of losses for tax purposes. The issue was "a can of worms you shouldn't open," Foster wrote in notes to himself. Rather than trigger an irs audit of past Whitewater deductions by claiming a loss, the Clintons...
...there thinking about this and again--for the umpteenth time--I realized an almost banal truth: that we now live in a single global civilization. The identity of this civilization does not lie merely in similar forms of dress, or similar drinks, or in the constant buzz of the same commercial music all around the world or even in international advertising. It lies in something deeper: thanks to the modern idea of constant progress, with its inherent expansionism, and to the rapid evolution of science that comes directly from it, our planet has, for the first time in the long...
...spine, for I could not help observing that one table had been singled out as being special and particularly important. It was a table for the big powers...The architect of that seating arrangement...was not guided by a sense of responsibility for the world, but by the banal pride of the powerful...
...companion on this trail of madness. When new ballplayers came up from the minors, for instance, I always talked to them. "What's it like to be here?" I wanted to know. "A dream come true," they said. The thing is, "a dream come true" is such a banal cliche that it pains me to type it. But when two rookies in a room of veterans have this conversation, the meaning is sky-blue clear. It is a shade unreal...