Word: banally
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cautious return to wider literary interests than poetry praising Mao or socially conscious tractor drivers did appear last year with the republication of Western classics like Thucydides and such traditional Chinese novels as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Monkey. But contemporary Chinese fiction is still appallingly banal by Western standards. At the Hsin Hua bookstore in Peking's main shopping district, I asked a salesgirl to tell me which of the recently published Chinese novels was reckoned the best. "Take your pick over there," she answered unselfconsciously. "They're all the same...
...BANAL AS ALL this must surely sound, there is no reason for it to appear any more or less hopeless than any other Truffaut plot. Like others it is simple; like others it is conventional. But where formerly Truffaut could somehow turn the seemingly uninteresting into the surprisingly charming, Two English Girls turns out to be quite as vapid as you would expect...
...this casting problem, especially when he uses black and white photographic montage: The images tone down Ross's star quality and, without the glitter, she makes a much more realistic Holliday. They serve another purpose by presenting the valleys of the singer's career in an effective, but not banal manner. Her rigorous prison sentence is portrayed by a few still photographs accompanied by a voice-over of Ross singing "Lady Sings the Blues." No acting could have been as moving...
...Vatican Council. "We must put people on their guard against books, journals and conferences where false ideas are propagated," he said. One idea he cited as false was that of "women religious giving up their dress, abandoning their own works, only to immerse themselves in purely secular activities, substituting banal and political activities for their orientation toward...
...good part of this attitude is Mailer's obvious awe of power and respect for professionalism, wherever found. But Nixon is even more in Mailer's eyes, not merely a political genius but an artist of the banal, "the Einstein of the mediocre and the inert." In an astute account of the psychological balance-sheet, Mailer sees that one egg thrown at a Republican matron by an antiwar demonstrator "can mop up the guilt of five hundred bombs" dropped on Viet...