Word: stale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spew out the same old Nathaniel West themes, only in a vulgarized way: the plasticity of Southern California, the impermanence of everything from buildings to relationships, etc. But the PR hype about Welcome to L.A. proved true in at least this one sense: Rudolph has carefully omitted all the stale cliches about the place and coined a couple of possible new ones in the process. There are no smog-hazed sunsets, no bronzed California girls in hiphugger jeans, no West Coast crazies. In their place, we only have genuine human beings grappling as best they can with the unkind vicissitudes...
...then there is nothing but unsophisticated burlesque, a flimsy bit of cold-cut sandwiched between skits and songs of stale humor. It is impossible to tell, from the program, which of the authors from the all-star line-up that wrote the show--Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Dan Greenburg, Tennessee Williams--goes with which skit. The idea behind the anonymity is to avoid invasion of the writer's privacy and sexual fantasy. For the most part, Tynan would have done better if he had worried instead about the literary reputations of his writers. Seventh graders and Science Center graffiti writers...
...AMUSEMENT FARE, An Evening of Bernstein is like a wildly assorted selection of leftovers from a good French restaurant. This smorgasbord is better and by far more interesting than what is usually served around Harvard; each dish by itself would be quite delicious. But some bits seem stale, there isn't really enough of any one thing, and the subtle flavors of some concoctions are drowned by the stronger flavors of others...
...described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions...
Harvard led for the last time when Beaulieu scored on a fingertip roll, for two of his game-high 30 points, and Hadley tallied a lay-up for a 65-63 lead. Then the defense went stale, passes went awry and the freshmen failed to conquer a fine Yale team...