Word: banality
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When Leopold alternates his paranoic pacing back and forth with trips to the medicine cabinet, we are unsure whether he runs to the bathroom to get the drugs out of his system or vomit quantities of banal expressions. The dramatic risk is that, trampled under the recylced rhetoric of the world around him, Lithgow loses the innermost psychological tension of the play. Havel's subtle development (or un-development) of Leopold's character evades Lithgow, who remains confined by the circularity of the plays gestures and language...
This years batch of commencement speeches are like most commencement speeches: cliche, vague, effete, boring. Instead of serving up banal generalizations, I wish they would tell us something we don't know, maybe even drop a political bombshell like the Marshall Plan. They should offer some practical advice or, at the very least they should make us laugh for a couple minutes...
Those mediocre programs taught a generation how to look at moving pictures and how to avoid social reality. The new big-screen sitcoms simply recognize TV's triumph of the banal. A few good movies (The Fugitive, The Addams Family, Wayne's World) may emerge from Naked Trend 4. But the lemming rush to televidiocy reveals a movie industry close to creative exhaustion...
When a Man Loves a Woman is a banal story about a drunk...
Overheard an infuriatingly banal comment in the dining hall the other...