Word: banally
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...mundane and illogical manner. This makes up the simultaneously brilliant and irritating quality of Ishiguro’s work; his characters may not delve deeply into their inner emotional complexities, but they are true to their real life counterparts, who often similarly cope with loss and failure in utterly banal ways...
Frustratingly, a number of songs use poorly-chosen passages from the novel to create banal lyrics. For instance, on the track “These Roads Don’t Move” lines like “These roads don’t move / You’re the one that moves,” are surely meant to feel prophetic, but instead just feel insipid. As anyone even vaguely familiar with Beat literature can attest, Kerouac’s writing offers more beautifully composed images than those selected by Gibbard and Farrar to depict in song...
...vision of a small Spanish tourist town still firmly in the grip of Francisco Franco’s guardia civil is political in its subtlety; “The Skating Rink” never pushes up against the brutal reality of fascism except in the most banal ways, and only when it serves the perfunctory plot. Bolaño raises his most intense and deeply esoteric criticism, not against the contemptible and defrauding bureaucrat Rosquelles, but against a more sinister and radical system, both bound up in and other from the political: “I remember during my second...
...unresolved narrative gives way to something far more beautiful and profoundly troubling. “Fat City” is a novel that changes itself as it moves. Tully struggles, torn between returning to the ring and succumbing to alcoholism. One of the most vibrant and paradoxically banal sections comprises Tully’s time as a day worker reminiscent of “Grapes of Wrath;” “Tully was hardly thinking now, his mind fixed on pain and chopping and a vision of quitting time. Seeing a man go to the edge...
...Later”) leads the film’s fictionalized diffusing team with a stunning performance as Sergeant First Class William James, a bomb-man with a death wish. The plot, essentially composed of almost journalistic vignettes, traces the ups and downs of everyday soldier life. Even the most banal serves as a suspenseful contrast to ticking bombs and explosions. When James confuses a dead boy’s bomb-strapped body for the young Iraqi kid he’d befriended, his reaction is both sincere and destructive—like no shortage of other situations in Iraq...