Word: fatuous
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...post-assassination sermon, an earnest lamentation about the "sickness of American society," has become a notably fatuous genre that blames everyone and then, after 15 minutes of earnestly empty regret, absolves everyone. It is true that there is a good deal of evil in the American air; television and the sheer repetitiousness of violence have made a lot of the country morally weary and dull and difficult to shock...
...Pope Pius IX published his astonishing Syllabus of Errors, which denounced freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and "the fatuous notion...that the Roman pontiff can be or should be reconciled to liberalism, progress, and modern civilization." Pius meant that the Church should stay away from any political ideologies, conservative or liberal. Nevertheless, the Syllabus became a sign that the Catholic Church was basically a repressive institution, allied with the forces of reaction...
Beyond the exotic cinematic locale and roguish approach, the clearest assets in Bye Bye Brazil are Jose Wilker and Betty Fariah as the veteran troupers. Wilker seems to have only two expressions--an unconvincingly heroic sternness and a wonderfully fatuous smile of beneficence--but he deploys them willingly. He provides a continual comic center to the film with his sly corruption and his charmingly sleazy hokum, often delivered at omnipotent volumes over what one suspects is the only amplifier in the Brazilian backlands. Diegues subtly uses Wilker's ridiculously inept shamming to represent more seriously the modern demand to sell...
...realms, out of the excruciating and quivering privacy in which it now abides. To avoid the English laureate's hobbling obsequiousness, an American laureate would have to be guaranteed his independence. But beware of a lifelong appointment, like one to the Supreme Court; it might make a poet fatuous, "official" and eventually senile...
Poor Walter Carlos, who produced Switched on Bach, for example, can't be held responsible for the creations of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Tomita, Vangelis, or Mike Oldfield, but his quasiorchestral synthesizer products directly influenced fatuous schools of rock and roll. For a long time, no one seemed to know what else to do with the synthesizer. More recently, Georgio Moroder and Donna Summer realized in "I Feel Love" a sound which no one will ever duplicate for sheer originality or sensuality. Nevertheless, millions of depraved Moog owners, sitting in their velour studios, will continue vainly to plagarize that...