Word: banalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even if Foer’s conception of himself as a concerned citizen rather than a journalist is silly and pedantic, it is a necessary one in the context that he provides. The decision to eat meat is central, though perhaps more banal, in a way that other moral dilemmas are not. As Foer notes, culture is expressed in eating practices, and to change what we eat is to fundamentally change our identity. But change can also mean progress, and although diehard carnivores looking for reasons not to give up meat will find holes in Foer’s argument...
...film otherwise focused on personal testimonies and confessions, her blankness seems to stem out of banal grievances. Her Krasinski-scripted loneliness does not have the same stark impact as that of her friend Harry (Benjamin Gibbard of “Death Cab for Cutie”), who uses Wallace’s words to confess the way he feels when his girlfriend is about to climax during sex: “This moment has this piercing sadness to it—of the loss of her eyes. I become like an intruder...
...mundane and illogical manner. This makes up the simultaneously brilliant and irritating quality of Ishiguro’s work; his characters may not delve deeply into their inner emotional complexities, but they are true to their real life counterparts, who often similarly cope with loss and failure in utterly banal ways...
Frustratingly, a number of songs use poorly-chosen passages from the novel to create banal lyrics. For instance, on the track “These Roads Don’t Move” lines like “These roads don’t move / You’re the one that moves,” are surely meant to feel prophetic, but instead just feel insipid. As anyone even vaguely familiar with Beat literature can attest, Kerouac’s writing offers more beautifully composed images than those selected by Gibbard and Farrar to depict in song...
...vision of a small Spanish tourist town still firmly in the grip of Francisco Franco’s guardia civil is political in its subtlety; “The Skating Rink” never pushes up against the brutal reality of fascism except in the most banal ways, and only when it serves the perfunctory plot. Bolaño raises his most intense and deeply esoteric criticism, not against the contemptible and defrauding bureaucrat Rosquelles, but against a more sinister and radical system, both bound up in and other from the political: “I remember during my second...