Word: banally
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...sight of some dusty relics in the school trophy room gives Greene a shiver. Still he is hardly prepared for the final evening, a candlelit, costumed rally in the chapel. There the frustrated Fox rashly taunts the girls about their antiSemitism, and promptly finds himself brutally assaulted by banal coeds turned bacchantes...
...banal problem perhaps. But it is also the stuff out of which millions of people create that awkwardly named but painful thing known as the mid-life crisis. For Rita it crests and breaks when her mother dies suddenly. Unmelodramatically but touchingly, Rita starts to come apart. This is not a subject that crops up much in movies aimed at today's youth-dominated market. Indeed, the central virtue of Summer Wishes may be that it is willing to dramatize such a human issue. But its carefully observed and delicately felt manner of doing so is also worthy...
...first movie made almost entirely about women by women, merits some small attention. It might have merited more if it had not been written and directed by Poet-Novelist Sandra Hochman (Walking Papers), who has used the women's movement as a sort of rostrum for some extravagantly banal personal fantasies. Much of Year of the Woman was shot, in documentary style, at the Democratic Convention in Miami last year. The coverage of the women's caucus, which is fleeting, has some hard intensity. There are also some moments of humor, such as Hochman performing a tap dance...
...most abused device is ironic crosscutting. Mai Zetterling has her somber Swedish fun jumping from overmuscled weight lifters to shots of mass-food preparation in the Olympic Village. But since these athletes are not overweight, considering their specialty, her juxtaposition of images is superficial and the idea behind it banal...
...biggest bastions of public relations reporting. To insure that none of their hundreds of local subscribers will object to their coverage, the AP and the UPI are careful to present the official version of news stories in the blandest and least provocative manner. Their philosophy in its most banal formulation is: aim at the lowest common denominator of public interest and avoid alientating either the Chicago Tribune or the Podunk Gazette. Investigative reporting that might raise hackles anywhere is, of course, out of the question: how Hersh managed to break the MyLai story while working...