Word: dullness
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...long. However, apart from a few catchy tunes, one memorable character and a helicopter sequence too frequently mocked to deride anymore, audiences also see why the show inspired so few fans to fight its closing: Trite, simplistic lyrics, undeveloped characters and a weak narrative structure make for a startlingly dull night of theater. The current production at North Shore Music Theatre unfortunately does very little to compensate for the play’s inherent weaknesses and somehow manages to exacerbate its ineffectiveness with a clumsy and distracting physical production. The only distinguishing element of the production is the central performance...
Last Sunday night as I sat in my room typing the next installment of my column, thinking of how dull the Harvard campus has been recently, I was interrupted by the piercing sound of my fire alarm. Cursing the now-routine recent barrage of fire drills, I grabbed my coat and rushed downstairs into the courtyard. Only this time, to my delight, the distinct smell of acrid smoke greeted my nostrils upon exiting the building...
These ideas, however, spring more out of the creators’ minds than those of the characters, whose psyches are of distinctly dull (though not uniformly dull-witted) quality. Though the Coens need to maintain a certain level of banality as a concession to the pulp genre, they drive their characters so far into the second dimension that there’s not much reason to take an interest in the players at any point...
...overacting side of the spectrum sit Michael Badalucco as Doris’ portly dolt of a brother and Polito as the comical entrepreneur. Thornton, on the other hand, is so dry that he makes Clint Eastwood looks like Richard Simmons, and McDormand is positively wasted as a dull pawn of Ed’s and the Coens’ plottings. Gandolfini, never better than when flaunting a corker of a malicious smile, lingers securely in the middle of the scale. Tony Shalhoub makes the film’s best showing as an improbably shrewd big-city lawyer with the terrific...
...travels in the land of guns, god, and corporate gurus,” are not so much petty as just old. The points are made more eloquently elsewhere (usually by Americans), and in the context of Laxer’s Canadian background, they sound particularly dull and whiny...