Word: blanding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scintillates. Gone is the stone-faced hero of a thousand Hong Kong films, the bland non-presence of Romeo Must Die and Kiss of the Dragon. Here for the very first time is an actor who delivers his lines with fluent, if slightly accented English, and injects the right amount of emotion into those lines. In an interview four years ago, Li lamented his typecasting as a perpetual fighter, explaining, “No one will pay to watch Jet Li act.” After this film, that state of affairs seems likely to change. He?...
...faults of the show lie mainly in David Thompson's book, which is too perfunctory with the minor characters and can't really bring off the couple's Act II decline into guilt and self-destruction. Bierko and Levering, moreover, are too bland as actors to really give this story the emotional punch it is striving for. Norbert Leo Butz, against all odds, becomes the standout in the cast, turning from sickly victim into a song-and-dance ghost, who comments ironically on the couple's plight in a swinging, Cy Colemanesque number, "Oh! Ain't That Sweet," that almost...
...faults of the show lie mainly in David Thompson's book, which is too perfunctory with the minor characters and can't really bring off the couple's Act II decline into guilt and self-destruction. Bierko and Levering, moreover, are too bland as actors to really give this story the emotional punch it is striving for. Norbert Leo Butz, against all odds, becomes the standout in the cast, turning from sickly victim into a song-and-dance ghost, who comments ironically on the couple's plight in a swinging, Cy Colemanesque number, "Oh! Ain't That Sweet," that almost...
...handed obviousness—could Howie be looking for a father figure to supplant his own crooked contractor dad?—and the ending is disappointingly inane, it resists the usual topical temptation for sensationalism. L.I.E. also manages to avoid the standard genre trick of trotting out every bland hypocrisy behind the picket fence...
...globes: everything is deliberate, planned, sanitized. What we get with a place that seemingly caters to everyone is an artificial Disneyland that is useful to none. And perhaps it is from this that the unsettling strangeness arises. Cambridge is like a bizarre Pleasantville—safely generic, abercrombifiedly bland, and disconcertingly eerie...