Word: banally
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...been a long, hot, quiet summer-ominously quiet. Then came the most banal of incidents: a dispute over a shattered windshield. "One thing led to another," said Police Captain Samuel Aliano. Soon a section of the fraying factory town of Lawrence, Mass. (pop. 62,770), was a battleground of ethnic animosities. On consecutive nights last week, Hispanics and whites pelted one another with rocks, bottles and fire bombs. Some 40 local policemen, backed up by state troopers and SWAT teams, used tear gas and nightsticks against the mob. The authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed a ten-hour curfew...
Sometimes menacing, often bleakly comic, always alarmingly precognitive, the visions of Writer Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) have their cinematic possibilities. The trouble is his movie is mostly banal, the stuff of arrested adolescence. It contains obsessively recurring images: woman as spider, devouring her mate once she has lured him to sexual consummation; woman as elusive Madonna, offering salvation to wayward boys if only they can catch her attention; campy sacrilege committed on Catholic iconography gloomy reflections on the artist's unhappy lot in a staid bourgeois society, with particular reference to Holland, where the audience is uneconomically small...
...absence of stimulating conversation adds to the film's clumsy, amateur appearance. Most of the dialogue is either narrative or banal, offering little insight into the characters as people. When the characters are occasionally developed. Bridges resorts to stereotypes. Mike carries around a black book with names of available women; Betty's erudite and artsy boyfriend quotes platitudes like "The ephemeral is the eternal"; and when Mike promises Betty "This time I'll call and come," she can't resist responding wittily "last time you called and came...
DIED. Mabel Mercer, 84, reigning queen of cabaret singers for nearly 70 years, whose unsurpassed ability to turn even the most banal tune into a timeless vignette of love and loss delighted generations of supper-club audiences; of heart disease; in Pittsfield, Mass. Born in England of a white English mother and black American father, Mercer gained renown at Bricktop's Paris café in the 1930s and went to the U.S. in 1939. As her husky contralto began to fail, she honed her unique blend of cadenced speech and vocalizing, delivering such songs...
...banal Paris street, the Rue Bourbon-le-Chateau. Yet the scene is far from ordinary. The orthogonals and links between objects give it a tense, mathematical substructure with all manner of arcane rhymes: the triad, for instance, of the red ball on the ground, the globe over the door and the pompon on the boy's cap. The cast of characters is mixed. The man in white might be a baker, or perhaps Christ carrying the lignum crucis; the two boys are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass...