Word: banally
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...unfortunately for Tinker and his backers at Gannett, jaunty stories that reek of the Time-Life Home Improvement series simply won't cut it. The uncritical tone of the program, reminiscent of banal public service spots, is going to make increasingly savvy viewers rush for their dials...
...those of his contemporaries (Barnett Newman, for instance) and those of past masters -- Durer, Grunewald, Picasso. His indirectness and liking for allusion coexist with something akin to physical rage: the body parts in his paintings speak of dismemberment, not mere anatomy. His diagonal cross-hatchings are both subtle and banal, for Johns' scrutiny flickers in a perplexing, teasing way between simple pattern recognition and active, probing attention -- so that something quite unremarkable as an image can swell up into a ravishing pictorial event. Sometimes one is excluded; it is like eavesdropping on a man who, half asleep...
...Monday, May 16, the plan broke down -- for the most banal of reasons. United and Merrill Lynch did not have enough funds in their accounts to cover outstanding checks, which started to bounce, alerting First Chicago officials that something was amiss. The bank traced the problem to Taylor and called in the FBI. Taylor named his coconspirators and agreed to make incriminating phone calls to Moore and the others that the FBI taped as evidence. Although Brown-Forman's funds were credited in Vienna, the money taken from United and Merrill Lynch was intercepted at Citibank before it left...
This colorful crew is self-satirizing. Any moralizing comment on their behavior would be superfluous. As for the central triangle (a cad, a cuckold and a tin-hearted tart deluded into thinking she has at last found a grand passion), it is too banal to awaken much emotion. Nor is there any point in using these figures from a remote society for social criticism. No, Radford has done the right thing with his material by observing the exaggerated tonalities of glamour-trash fiction. As a result, White Mischief plays as something a lot of people claim to have been missing...
Perhaps the 1980s have been such a banal era that cliches are the only appropriate way to comment on it. At least that would explain the odd decision to include an excerpt from the Newsweek article christening yuppies in the program. Just in case it wasn't already in the zeitgeist of everyone in the theater, the article assured the existence of a common culturally stereotyped language. Yet it doesn't seem that even Reddin actually believes that yuppies are without any individual quirks or desires. The actors, who are stiff and who often seem to be unsure of themselves...