Word: glib
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...lines across the stage and run unseen by their older living images?a double exposure in three dimensions. The principals are, literally, beside themselves with grief. For, as it happens, the Weismann theater is not the only institution awaiting the wrecking ball. The other is marriage. Sally and her glib, skirt-chasing husband Buddy (Gene Nelson) have become pathetic caricatures of the Andy Hardy couple they once were?naivete swallowed by facts. Phyllis and her acrid WASP's-nest of a husband Ben (John McMartin) are glamour gone dry, a wasteland with wedding rings...
This denouement is glib and unsatisfactory, intimating that the source of all Marcello's problems is a long-suppressed homosexuality. Bertolucci has said that the parading band of Communists who jostle Marcello in the last scene are intended to suggest "the wave of the future." But that symbol, juxtaposed with the homosexuality episode, creates confusion where there should be revelation, and will leave audiences more or less where it leaves Marcello: nowhere. There is some other rather lumpish and facile symbolism throughout the film that Bertolucci's virtuosity can only partially disguise...
...very glib, all true to widely varying extents, all very "now" things to say. All offensive, especially in their slick matrix, but not particularly pernicious. Unfortunately, Harkness shares other insights that are far more insidious. For instance, he criticizes "a fervent Marxist-Leninist" acquaintance: "We figured that any changes that were really going to happen were going to happen in people's heads . . . . So we blew our dope and stayed in our heads . . . . " Yet, describing the transformation of his friends and himself from straight to freak, Harkness includes the stage when "your parents [see] a picture...
Miss Joyce (who also wrote Five Easy Pieces) has a good ear for regional nuances of speech but an unpleasant affinity for glib denouements. Schatzberg betrays his origins as a fashion photographer and commercial director in every fussy shot in the film. Each separate sequence has all the elaborate, artificial, deadening care lavished on it that Schatzberg might have employed on a true-to-life, 30-second TV spot for Gainesburgers...
...first section is somewhat unattractive at first glance. The opening poem. "Her and It." seems glib, rough, much too much like inferior e. e. cummings. Thus: "I fell in love with a girl. / O and a gash. / I'll bet she now has seven lousy children. / (I've three myself, one being off the record.)" This section celebrates Berryman's collegiate sexuality, makes ever so clear that he was Mark van Doren's prize pupil, and refers to Eliot as "Tom" and Joyce as "Jim." Berryman, of course, is noted for this sort of thing, the seeming arrogance which some...