Word: banally
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...achievement has been to take an extraordinary range of banal objects, invest them with consistent metaphoric power, and turn them into near-epic images of love and death. Baudelaire once remarked of talent that it "is nothing more nor less than childhood rediscovered at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression, with man hood's capacities and a power of anal ysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated." So with Oldenburg, whose art, for all its complexity, signals a way back to the unrepressed appetites of childhood. "Everything...
...convinced he was dying, sat down to write novels as a way of providing a legacy for his wife. Instead of dying, he lingered on to become a chronic writer. Rich, healthy Howard, by contrast, can think of nothing better to do than squander his easy money on a banal overseas tour and then commit suicide. It is not that Howard is outraged or dis gusted by life; he simply does not know what to do with...
...apartment (and her heart), calling out from the kitchen, "I can tell you're nice," as he carefully helps himself to loose objects decorating her living room. Mindless she may be, characterless she is not. I can't remember any of her lines, but in spite of a banal script she makes a delightful happy-go-lucky sucker to Segal's dangerous charm...
Half the time it seems devoted only to undermining the studio-born materials with which Williams has been saddled. And so the continuing "suspense" music contains an echo of mock heroics and banal conversations that are staged in comical settings, like a San Francisco zoo. Of course, such time-honored methods of beating the Hollywood system are the stuff of which auteurs are made--except that in Williams' case, he never goes beyond such kamikaze tactics...
...floor, the tipped-over paint tin that spreads its river beneath the "bridge" is an everyday accident. But the sum effect is a crazy quilt of potentially familiar objects, a mosaic of recollection that is suggested but eludes the viewer. In this way, Wiley manages to endow something as banal as a wooden stump with a tantalizing load of implied memory. The strategy is as old as surrealism. So are the verbal games, with their free association and childish puns. But in Wiley's hands it all acquires a special density...