Word: banalized
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...accept democratic forms, including elections. Not surprisingly, the French left's reaction has been sharp. The usually left-leaning daily Le Monde has gamely praised the "passionate challenge" raised by the New Philosophers. But the socialist Le Matin has flatly condemned their thinking as "elegant despair" and "a banal form of dandyism." A commentator in the pro-Socialist Nouvel Observateur blasted the New Philosophers as mere "disc jockeys of ideas...
Still, One on One is a fairly decent movie, even it if lacks redeeming artistic value. It succeeds mostly because it does entertain, despite the predictable romance and occasionally banal dialogue. The film is fast-paced and even funny upon occasion, as in the scene which features our hero driving a drunken, nymphomaniacal athletic department secretary home from a party. He has his eyes on the road, but her eyes are on something else, leading to a rather embarassing situation...
...wins the Big Game. Yes, this is a sports film, the subject being big-time college basketball. Yes, it demonstrates once again that amidst all the pious talk about amateur ideals, colleges pay off their stars under the table and exploit them just dreadfully. With that much of the banal plot laid out, it perhaps hardly needs to be added that the hero (Robby Benson, who wrote the script with his father, Jerry Segal) starts out as an absurdly innocent freshman. Slowly he becomes aware of the wicked ways of the world, refuses to join in the general cynicism...
...hammered by his wife, goes on vacation to avoid publicity; the daughter uses her father's fame to advance her career, sleeping with the exploitative journalist and calling her nightclub act 'The Factory Murderer's Daughter.' Fassbinder is intrigued by rituals, by those things which make life most banal and predictable. Mother Kusters is forever either stirring a red pot on the stove or, because the West German "economic miracle" has happened, she is snapping electric sockets into plastic holders at the kitchen table...
...FASSBINDER fails ideologically, he redeems himself through exciting visual effects. It is easy to point out influences in this respect: he places characters in their social setting with the exactitude of Sirk, revelling in the banal and vulgar in terms of taste (flowered wallpaper and knick knacks abound in Mother K.'s apartment); he makes Brechtian use of awkward camera positioning to alienate, shooting not from within the action, but as an observer so that his audience will be responsible for creating its own realism; like Godard, he favors a fade-out to black between shots, allowing his viewer...