Word: banalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof it up to songs with lyrics about death. A hospital fantasy sequence looks at once like an elaborate antismoking commercial, a parody of Fellini and a Vegas floor show. The results...
...drugstore, although best is the fancy kind, with pretensions, such as are plentiful at the southern end of Brattle Street. An invariable, perhaps immutable progression in the arrangement of the objects will emerge. From the front of the store to the back, from the esoteric to the mundane and banal, from the pretty to the unpresentable, everything unfolds in a predetermined...
Here on the center shelves are the prosaic items, toothbrushes and toothpaste, utilitarian, kid-proofed bottles of aspirin, razor blades, wart-burning solutions, hemorrhoid suppositories, the banal soaps of everyday for people who use soap to get clean. You notice the preponderance of American trochees: Colgate, Ben-Gay, Right Guard, Band Aids, Q-TIPS...
Sanchez has his own line on the Stones: they are not nice people. His Jagger is a megalomaniac trampling over his friends, even members of the band, to achieve millionaire respectability, a pseudo-hipster who never outgrew his banal suburban upbringings and mother-love. His Keith Richards is a vicious junkie, a coward, a racist, a cruel manipulator. Richards exploits Sanchez throughout, to smuggle drugs or take the rap for auto accidents or whatever. Since he was paying Sanchez a grand a month to do almost nothing, it doesn't seem all that reprehensible...
...dinner in Manhattan, Stacks was unable to attend because of a previous engagement: he had flown to Des Moines for three days of watching George Bush beat the bushes in Iowa. Despite all the arduous travel involved, Stacks takes special pleasure in campaign reporting. "Politicians are sometimes silly, sometimes banal, frequently self-serving and occasionally absolutely unbearable," he says. "But they are just as often earnest, serious and creative in proposing solutions to the problems the nation faces. In an election year, there is no better assignment in journalism...