Word: insipidities
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shuttling between the intriguing past and the insipid present, Richard Young, a priggish fellow, attempts to keep his vulgarian wife ignorant of his new time travel kick but succeeds only in riveting her-and a wary community's-attention upon his strange behavior. Du Maurier's view of both modern and medieval marriage is remarkably waspish, but it is this very connubial bitchiness that keeps the novel from a routine Gothicism and makes it a stylish, contemporary entertainment...
Curves and Angles. Materials and objects proved only variously susceptible to the sensibility of the age. Cut glass, perfume flasks or a bubbly blue glass Steuben amphora look as pristine and crisp today as they did when Gertrude Lawrence was taking her first bows. Ceramie platters with insipid doe-eyed female heads and statuettes of languid girls on the other hand, are likely to be valued only by aficionados of kitsch. Certain themes and color schemes predominated: outrageous colors prompted by Léon Bakst's Ballet Russe sets; Egyptian motifs and Aztec patterns...
Like all of Chekhov, The Three Sisters is open to several interpretations, but to make it insipid, boring and silly requires Ball's gall as well as his company's ineptitude. As the guest director of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, Gower Champion manages to intrude defects on the play that it never possessed. Feydeau was to the French bedroom farce what Einstein was to the theory of relativity. With gimmicks and gaucherie, Champion botches all of Feydeau's intricately precise equations of who-is-sleeping-with-whom-be-hind-which-door...
...institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti's insipid " Christ Climbed Down" ("from his bare tree/this year/and ran away to where /no intrepid Bible salesman/covered the territory/in two-tone cadillacs...
...outcome of all this is about as predictable as the benumbing succession of autopomorphic gags. Connoisseurs of camp may enjoy watching Tomlinson ranting at the Volkswagen, but The Love Bug is surely the first film in which the actors (Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett) are so meticulously insipid that a car can handily steal the show...