Word: banally
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Like the characters of In Their Wisdom, circling their pot of gold, Snow still twitches with what he calls the "tic of hope." He concludes with a phrase that a dozen years ago would have brought cries of "Banal old fogy!" from all the Angry Young Men. "The worst doesn't always happen," he writes. Today, in a world that will settle for less, the words mean more-even ring with a certain Colonel Blimp gallantry. How Snow readers have changed! How Snow has stayed the same! ·Melvin Maddocks
...hand over play-money to each other. Predictably, the business sector gets it all and the whole thing winds up being slightly less funny than an Ec 10 lecture. Some skits are more successful, but don't seem particularly original--the one about the guru who celebrates "the banal and the obvious" sounds a lot like the National Lampoon's Craig Baker series, for example, and "Euclid's Elemental" is second-rate Tom Lehrer...
...Anderson's reaction to his loss of face in the critic's circle. Although he viewed his disparagement as unwarranted, it was actually the logical end to a series of overworked and monotonous albums which beat such dead horses as religious hypocrisy and dollar-chasing. Passion Play, a banal declaration of the existence of good and evil in the world, was only the straw that broke the critics' back. Not being able to satisfy the critics, Anderson decided to satisfy himself instead. And now, eight months later. Anderson has left his "retirement" with a recognition that aggression...
...they can be structured by film-makers. In order to do this, however, he has had to make an unusually structured film, writing out every word of dialogue and thinking out each shot beforehand. Eustache's script repays careful attention even when it seems most banal, and his meaning gets denser as the film goes...
...supporting players, most of them Claudine's kids, are slightly less selfconscious, but they too are types of the most banal sort: the eldest boy flirting with the black revolutionary movement, the eldest girl suddenly getting pregnant at age 15. And so on. But then what can you expect of a movie about blacks in which the main love scene is preceded by a meal of fried chicken? Thank heavens they did not have watermelon for dessert, but that is about the only cliché of black life the film has avoided. Richard Schickel