Word: fatuous
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...children love best is plenty of handsomely presented visual detail, so that they can pore over a book again and again. What they keep getting is sweeping, uncluttered spreads in yummy pastels, or Neanderthal collages depicting, say, one mouse, two frogs and a lily pad, accompanied by perhaps seven fatuous words per page. Pleasant enough, but nothing in it to justify the price or keep the mind alive, even for a single rereading...
...answer must be met with a Sophie-like acedia from the viewer. This pseudoexistential drama is the celluloid version of novocain, deadening whatever-or whomever-it touches. Events are talked about, not shown. Sophie deals in fatuous aphorisms ("Answering services are for muffling the services of the dying"). Her acquaintances reply with even more glittering zircons. One character, admiring a pair of inexpensive Italian shoes, hoots, "What multitudes we recline...
...conclusion, both Jonathan and Sandy have become fatuous travesties of the American male, a creature, the film implies, who loathes the apposite sex. Sandy is a superannuated swinger, complete with stash, burns and a 17-year-old hippie on his arm. Jonathan is even more pathetic. In the final semi-surrealistic scene, he lies on his back awaiting the ministrations of a prostitute (Rita Moreno). As she sinks slowly, agonizingly slowly, to her knees she recites a ritual of masculine domination: "You have ... an inner power so great that every act, no matter what, is more proof of that power...
...cites the Nixon Administration's bill as consistent with the philosophy of free enterprise. True free enterprise requires 1) a reasonable supply of the commodity to meet consumer needs and 2) ability of consumers to estimate value received. Since neither requirement is usually met, the philosophy argument seems fatuous. I wish the Administration were as compulsive about producing doctors as they are about making SSTs...
...Peace, Bondarchuk found himself at home with war and inept with peace. In Waterloo, he again directs less than he deploys. Psychological insight is conveyed by closeups of the stars' eyes, interminable crosscuts from the Duke of Wellington to Napoleon Bonaparte and fatuous "voiceover" soliloquies, like Napoleon's: "This Englishman has two qualities that I admire-caution, and above all courage...