Word: bland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dime," for example, and "Dinah Flo" were FM classics, but FM airplay is a notoriously poor way to pay the rent. It was the old story--a critical acclaim and cult following which did not translate into anything tangible and preferably green. His gradual evolution from rock to a bland middle-of-the-road sound just wasn't making it and he was due for either a radical change or more years in obscurity...
...sting came to light when Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev announced that the 1977 Soviet grain harvest would amount to 194 million metric tons-the lowest since 1975. That bland statistic caused tremors of shock through not only the U.S. Department of Agriculture but the Central Intelligence Agency as well. All summer long the Agriculture experts and the CIA operatives who try to keep track of conditions on Soviet farms had forecast a fat 215 million-ton harvest, indicating that Moscow would not need to buy much foreign grain this year. But the bulletin from Brezhnev meant precisely the opposite...
...strength cannot possibly be sustained at full intensity throughout all 27 sequences; some of the texts could be eliminated without doing violence to the whole. And not only did the movement often bear a purely arbitrary relation to the music, but also it was internally inconsistent. There were occasional bland passages of traditional ballet figures, as well as moments of apparently random borrowing from other styles, such as Indian dance. Finally, the Harvard-Radcliffe choral groups, singing under crowded conditions, too often suffered from blurred pitch, particularly among the sopranos...
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich
...EDOUARD MANET painted At the Railroad Station; four years later Claude Monet painted a similar scene. Manet chose to depict two pretty women sitting under a sunny sky with the station creating a bland industrial backdrop. Monet omitted the smiling women, painting only the dark, smoky blue train station; and the opening shot of Julia is a technicolor replica of his ominous image--an image that is repeated frequently throughout the film. Julia is the story of Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her childhood friend (Vanessa Redgrave) whom she christens "Julia," who together lost the insular beauty of their adolescence...