Word: banally
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From Russia without love came a biting film critique in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. The plot is "pretty naive and banal," and the purpose of the film is to "arouse a psychosis against the Soviet Union in the Western countries -the evil atmosphere of days long since gone." The offending movie: Telefon, a U.S. spy flick now being filmed in Helsinki. Cast as a brainy KGB agent who goes to the U.S. on a mission, Charles Bronson is denounced by Izvestia as "the stereotype immutable hero of thriller-type movies." Is Bronson crushed? Nyet. "They must like that," he says...
...Greene's Quiet American. She returned to cover the war for the New York Times from 1970 to 1972. Sometimes in this long documentary meditation on the war she becomes morally proprietary about Viet Nam, brittle with self-righteousness. Yet that indignation gives her book-despite its oddly banal title-a fine fury and intelligence. When someone suggests that too much has already been done on Viet Nam, Emerson replies: "Let the books be written, so when all of us are dead a long record will exist, at least in a few libraries...
CARRIE. The banal and the supernatural frighteningly, yet touchingly, juxtaposed in Director Brian De Palma's tale of how the high school prom went all wrong. Sissy Spacek is spooky as the strangely gifted heroine...
Bryan Ferry is another of these gilded colebrators of the bizarre and the banal in a uniquely British fashion. He palms off the best image of the '50s spy I know--there are whole dance halls in London filled with his knitted-tied and bobby-soxed followers. His music epitomises his adopted era: scholocky lyrics about love and a family and monagamy delivered with a nasty curl of the lip and an ugly anger beneath it all. Bryan Ferry sings love songs about hate undiscriminately directed. I await his version of "Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes" with interest...
...West, succeeds in bring the reader close to an understanding of his literary environment. Rejecting the narcotic apathy in the midst of progress that he considers the downfall of "Our defeated generation...," Qabbani appeals to the young to ignore their parents' example "For we have failed/Are worthless and banal as a melon rind...