Word: banality
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These lessons are important, but in the shadow of the Holocaust rather banal. They do not require the authority of Auschwitz. They follow easily enough from Soweto and Howard Beach, from Sarajevo and Nagorno-Karabakh...
...accepts what producer Art Linson says about writers who sell their books to the movies: "You bought the ticket, and you have to take the ride." Tobias grumbles only a bit. He doesn't think much of Getchell's script, which seems to him "a little banal and sitcomish, with a few cheap thrills thrown in." He objects to a rough sex scene between Robert De Niro, who plays the churlish stepfather Dwight, and Ellen Barkin, who plays the mother Caroline. (The Wolff brothers' mother is Rosemary in real life.) Tobias believes the sex scene breaks the film's point...
...been frazzled by a stroke, the answer is an emphatic yes -- sometimes. In the new version off-Broadway, Jeffrey Lunden's score provides evocatively dissonant metaphors for what is going on inside the afflicted woman's head. But when Arthur Perlman's book and lyrics guide her into banal emotional bonds with a therapist and fellow patients, the sentimentality seems out of character for the tough, fearless old woman so vividly acted by Linda Stephens...
...bulk of the play is weighty conversation, the characters are often left with nothing noteworthy to do. Again, this could be the intention, even the central focus of the Dream of the Red Spider, but the critical flatness and distance that can lift a farce above its banal and stereotypical underpinnings never surface. The author's despair and alienation are evident, but we are never given any reason for his whiny melancholia. It is a shame that the truly complex and harrowing aspects of life under a dictatorship are not examined in depth, for instance as in Ariel Dorfman...
...full of new collectors ready to believe that practically anything could be the Wave of the Future. The Hoovers were hoovered up. Then came some aquarium tanks in which basketballs floated, weighed down by a solution of Epsom salts and water to neutralize their buoyancy. These rather banal objects still strike Koons' fans as veritable icons of mystery and memory. "They are . . . dead things," writes curator John Caldwell, "and we realize with a shock that that is what they are for us as well, something from the past, our own youth, familiar once and fraught with memories. . . It suddenly dawns...