Word: insipid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...setting of Lily Tomlin's latest vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a movie which, at its outset, promises to be a wicked satire of the TV age, filled with subtle humor, razor-sharp ridicule of American pop culture, and ingenious manipulation of every tiny comic detail of insipid domestic life. Unfortunately, Shrinking Woman--in its last half hour--reneges on its tacit deal with the audience, degenerating from incisive social satire to the silly comedy-adventure shenanigans of a Gene Wilder--Richard Pryor movie. Director Joel Schumacher and scriptwriter Jane Wagner let the film slowly slide into the quicksand...
Anyone with a penchant for genuine vodka will find the third sentence insipid. Shostakovich wrote the explanation after he composed the symphony in 1937, probably as an attempt to be restored to favor with Soviet officials after earlier compositions had been attached in Pravda. Unfortunately, most of Friday afternoon's audience, skewed as usual toward the elderly, probably took the composer at face value...
...Picasso of 1918-24 was made for this situation. With ebullience, he threw himself into the role of the maestro, designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, marrying one of its dancers, and allowing a conventional style of portraiture, often as insipid as the $3 million Acrobat sold to Japan in last week's Garbisch auction, to alternate with a highly decorative form of cubism. "Decorative," of course, is no longer a cuss word, and his best flat-pattern cubist paintings of the early '20s, with their gravely shuttling collage-like overlaps of bright and dark color...
...with its temperamental stars and eclectic repertory. Choreographer Agnes de Mille remarked that "Lucia is nine-tenths granite," probably an accurate assessment, but a side of Chase that the public did not see. Formerly a ballerina, she became a self-effacing impressario who stayed out of the spotlight, gave insipid interviews when talking at all, and quietly went on ordering up the baling wire to keep A.B.T. going...
...film contains a rather guarded performance by Alan Bates as Diaghilev and an ill-considered one by Leslie Browne, the young ballerina in Director Ross's The Turning Point. She is here both glum and insipid as she pursues not an ambition but a man. A young dancer from the American Ballet Theater, George de la Pena, acts the part of Nijinsky quite effectively. There is a certain ineluctable spirit about him. But of his dancing, strangely, nothing at all can be said: Ross never permits him to per form a complete sequence of a ballet. In one instance...