Word: banally
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...condescending challenge, 'Are you good enough to keep up with us?' In one such scene, an actor sets a picnic table in front of a slide projection of trees and ferns, eats lunch and prattles about his relationship to Hitler as Obersalzburg servant. It's quite dull. Even... yes, banal. "Why are you fidgeting in your seats?" he turns quickly and asks the audience, smiling. "Bored?" He continues, undaunted by the repressed jeers. Syberberg knows he's boring the masses and, with contempt, he continues. Adolph Hitler, he points out, did everything but bore the masses...
...artificial, documentary nature of the proceedings actually makes for some of the film's most precious moments. Pianist Jay McShann grins and mimics a journalist's banal patter: "Joe Turner, you know that you are a Kansas City figure. You're a backbone of Kansas City, so tell us something about yourself." Later, Basie sits down at the foundation's scarred piano and improvises a few bars of two-fisted stride, then looks up, deadpan, at the camera: "That...
...times, Mazlish and Diamond descend from the simplistic into the banal. In various parts of the book, the authors compare Carter to DeGaulle, Gandhi, the young Luther (a la Erik Erikson) Oliver Cromwell and Handsome Lake, a Seneca Indian who had a series of revelations that led to his belief in his own leadership. Where other presidents are heroes or policy-makers, Carter belongs in the ranks of "revitalizers." Bear with the authors' dangling prose...
...time Arledge joined ABC in 1960 (he became president of ABC Sports in 1968), almost everything he touched turned to gold: NCAA football, Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football (with the ineffable Howard Cosell in the announcing booth), even the Battle of the Network Stars and all its banal offspring. Under his leadership, ABC bid millions to televise the Olympics and transformed the games into global theater. His use of multiple cameras, instant replay, slow motion, on-field microphones and other electronic gimmickry revolutionized sports coverage...
...some others: psychologists persistently refer to unresponsive women as "preorgasmic," and Masters and Johnson call foreplay a "stimulative approach opportunity," perhaps the most effective sexual turn-off since saltpeter. Therapists speak of "actualizing," to mean the fulfillment of potential. "I hear you" has descended from the aural to the banal; it means a total understanding of the speaker's temperament. "Lifing" is the effort to derive the utmost from every day; "Who are you screaming with?" a glancing allusion to primal therapy, is now a query about any psychological aid the subject is seeking...