Word: fatuous
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...Coppola's artistic mission was to parallel Marie and her retinue with today's modern youth, cocooned in their own search for pleasure. Straddling the centuries, Coppola puts her idle rich in period dress and accompanies their fatuous frolics with raucous rock music. The spirit here is less the divine decadence of Paris, France, than the spoiled shallowness of Paris Hilton. Obsessed with their games, gossip and petty erotic intrigues, these Valley children of privilege are oblivious to the needs and sufferings of oppressed humanity. Coppola, herself a princess of movie royalty, may be painting a corrosive portrait...
...simple focal points in a world in which we have too much information. As Witness preaches--See It, Film It, Change It--the most valuable commodity in ending misery is not money or even will but attention. And attention is the celebrigod's lightning bolt. If the most fatuous celebrity plants himself near a problem, he may embarrass himself. But at least someone will see it. And someone will film it. And a few of us may, little by little, be moved to change...
...quantify a negative, but it seems obvious that the absence of leadership -- the opportunities squandered or unenvisioned -- costs the world dearly every day. War is a profound habit -- and sometimes a necessity. When Neville Chamberlain declared ''peace for our time'' after Munich, he gave peacemakers a reputation for fatuous optimism and appeasement from which it took them years to recover. Philosophers of war since Hiroshima have taught, hopefully, that the nuclear threat has made armed conflict ultimately untenable as a Clausewitzian instrument (foreign policy that happens to kill) useful in settling disputes. But not everyone has absorbed the lesson. Among...
...from fans pining for the British original. In its second season, The Office proves it's no one's poor American cousin; it captures the absurdities of white-collar life right down to the uncomfortable office parties at Chili's. Steve Carell (The 40 Year-Old Virgin) is dependably fatuous as a gasbag middle manager. But it's the relative unknowns, particularly Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski as co-workers with an unconsummated crush, that give The Office its charm. Never has a lousy job been so much...
...narrative itself—unable to create real suspense surrounding even the most extreme of scenarios—conspire to sink Saturday like a lead balloon. It is perhaps no wonder then that McEwan was testy at his reading, snapping at the audience’s admittedly fatuous questions and reading a lengthy segment spanning each of the novel’s ill-fitting strands as if in defiance. Everybody fails at times, and McEwan has a phenomenal talent which here pokes through all too rarely. To ignore his failure here is to do a disservice to the fantastic work...