Word: insipid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mortgage." Teaching people three, four and five times his age to write and read, an 11-year-old boy--one of 120,000 brigadistas in the nation's literacy campaign--recites to his pupils lessons like: "The Sandinista Front guards against Yankee imperialism." Along the highways, there are those insipid billboards--the smiling workers with strong shoulders and full faces, who sell only happiness and, by inference, obedience. The crudity of the symbols causes a little shudder. They seem so familiar, and they should, since they mark every up-to-date society, from Iran to Libya to, as these movies...
...course not everything works. Several obvious jokes are beaten laboriously into submission, particularly in the articles on a fat chef, a "liberated" inflatable lady and the Shah in hell. A promising spoof of those insipid People interviews ends drearily when the same joke--the interviewer not recognizing his subject's newsworthy statements--dies from repetition. The parody also slips up in the celebrity department. Probably because it concentrates on the briefly famous folks in People, it never captures the unique flavor of People's celebrity profiles; the parody doesn't look at the amusing laundry list--current success, difficult childhood...
...fact, shredding the sound track may not be such a bad idea. Except for a handful of faltering scenes--an insipid look on a wife bidding her husband farewell when he leaves for Turkey, a near descent into bathos after the first battle scene and a few half-hearted scenes of soldiers at liberty in the market in Egypt--the sounds that accompany Boyd's overwhelming images are the film's only flaw. Even the zipping and buzzing muzak noises would not be so awful except that Weir repeatedly splices between them Albinoni's dirge-like Adagio in G minor...
...insipid but reptilian nephew, Oscar's son Leo (Dennis Christopher), raids the bank vault and thwarts his uncle. As Horace cradles the all but empty bank box, Regina goads him into a heart spasm and icily denies him the lifesaving pills that are just beyond his reach. After a few more calculated turns of Lillian Hellman's plot screws, Regina proves to be more fearsome than any little...
MICHAEL CIMINO GOT LUCKY. Back in 1978, Vietnam was just becoming hot movie material, Cimino, the spunky young director with one movie under his belt (the insipid Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), sold the British recording company EMI the idea for a terrific film--a gut-wrenching Vietnam drama. The Deer Hunter. A hot idea, Vietnam laced with contemporary American pop romanticism. The Vietnam War the way Bruce Springsteen would probably sing about it. Workin' class guys, they go and they fight for their country, 'cause their country ain't so great, you know--it's real bad sometimes--but they...