Word: shallowing
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That is reason enough to shun most of the ostentatious or shallow works that are beginning to decorate the retail shelves. Still, this and every year, a few volumes speak in the future indicative...
STALLONE'S DIRECTING is as bad as his screenplay. He overuses close-ups, slow motion and freeze shots in attempting to create the dramatic tension his shallow characters and uninteresting plot fail to provide. In one scene, Victor is delivering a large block of ice to someone who lives up a long flight of stairs: close-ups of Victor's sweating face, shots of the imposing staircase, shots of Victor climbing the stairs, and so on, until he finds the customer did not want any ice. What should be drama becomes unwitting comedy...
Bakshi's animation fails largely because he tries to dictate all these things from his own vision an interpretation that is dauntingly shallow...
...shallow, sexist questions put to Marina von Neumann Whitman, the one about the gerbils infuriates her most. How did the family gerbils like the trip from Pittsburgh to Washington when she served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1972-73? Macho editors, who would never put such a question to a man, still send women's page reporters to interview her, and well-meaning businessmen still give her head-patting lectures to explain balance sheets. Whitman smiles at the condescension and responds with her ultimate putdown: a stunning soliloquy on international economics...
...that's what is so disappointing here. A lot of hard work was put to waste trying to save Savages. Trevor Barnes's West dominates all the other actors with his fine mellifluous voice throughout his interesting performance. Horwitz as the revolutionary Carlos almost overcomes his hopelessly shallow part, although he occasionally stumbles over a Spanish accent that sounds too patently bogus for the audience to swallow. And Don Pullam comes up with a truly excellent performance in his one scene as an irredeemably culture-bound idiot-missionary bringing civilization to the heathen. The tribe of otherwise Stone-Age Indians...