Word: bland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Still, some habits die hard. If Saint Jack is not another complete embarrassment for Bogdanovich, it nonetheless reveals his deficiencies as a film maker. Again he describes emotions without ever feeling them; he flogs tired ideas to death and gets bland performances from his cast. Saint Jack shows off Bogdanovich's considerable craftsmanship, but it has the look of a high-minded movie, too empty to arouse any emotion other than indifference...
...alternative" into the association's name. IF. Stone, the archetype of maverick journalists, picked up on their discomfiture in his keynote speech that night: "I understand you have qualms about being called alternatives, and after looking at your papers, I must say you've got the most bland kind of alternative. You don't try to change the world, you just titillate...
Even as a love story, the film fails. Part of the problem is the stars, who are too bland, and at times charmless, to inspire much audience empathy. A sadder difficulty is the script's uncertainty of tone. Alex's and Sheila's batty home lives are presented in such outrageous broad strokes that the credibility of the couple's supposedly sincere romance is under mined. There are a few funny peripheral moments, especially those that focus on the mores of video dating, but there are also stale gags about wayward cars and coitus interruptus...
Once safely ensconced at Berkeley, Levenson was greeted by a critical response to his first work that ranged from bland encouragement to outright viciousness. The radical nature of Levenson's work--his relativism, his concern for the context and social bases for thought and his use of dialectics evoked the wrath of the senior American Sinologist then writing, Arthur Hummel. Hummel wrote that Levenson was merely "out to get his man," and that the book "really tells us more about the wayward, corrosive thinking of our time than it does about ... 'the first mind of new China...
...flight magazines, those airline-sponsored throwaways, used to be as bland and insubstantial as inflight food. Now they are expensively produced, professionally edited and immensely prosperous. Ten leading airline monthlies last year carried advertising worth $20 million, or double the amount three years...