Word: banally
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...used to be that, regardless of how banal or superficial politics in the rest of the country became, we could always count on New York City to spice things up. While the rest of us were content with passivity, New Yorkers embraced an active cynicism that would get them worked up about those bums in power...
...sober realism of her style that redeemed the novel, its weight and conviction that prevented readers from noticing (or caring) that by replacing noble enigmas with banal behaviorism, Smiley had downsized tragedy to melodrama. The movie version--bereft of diverting literary stratagems, relentlessly focused on what-next narrative--takes it another step down--to soap opera...
...saying we have to abandon our species' well-known sense of humor and go around shouting Hallelujah! at every rock Sojourner stumbled on. In the end, in the spirit of science, we want those rocks to become as familiar and even banal to us as the ones we run into with our lawn mowers. If all goes well, our grandchildren will encounter the floodplains of Mars in a third-grade geography lesson, and maybe even find them a little dull. But cuteness short-circuits the whole process of learning and discovery. When we turn the Martian terrain into a comic...
...SEALs into fighting trim, with sardonic objectivity. We know where Scott's sympathies lie--he did, after all, make those terrific tributes to female capability, Alien and Thelma & Louise--but he wears them lightly. What he does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isolation and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these days...
...would not, however, characterize it as "hurtling" through space to that theater near you. It proceeds very slowly through many banal deliberations about cosmic enigmas to a comfortably reassuring conclusion in which scientific humanism and vaguely uplifting religiosity are squishily reconciled...